Alex Young

I got into analytics and data work in 2006 and started digging into the field on my own. Since 2011, my focus has been on scraping and proxy-based data collection: the data was always the goal, and proxies were the tool that made it possible at scale.

In 2019, I founded PapaProxy.net, and I still run it today as its lead technical specialist. We work with mid-to-large proxy volumes for small and mid-size teams. Our core principle is simple: prices stay below market because the money goes into infrastructure, not marketing. The service grew out of solving our own problem — we needed proxies at large volumes for data collection, and the market was either too expensive or too unreliable for serious workloads.

I’m a scraping expert first and foremost. I write about how to build and continuously modernize data-collection systems, get stable results, and keep budgets under control — based on what’s actually gone through production: what broke, how we fixed it, and what that tells you about how proxies behave under heavy load.