How to Migrate from NetNut to ProxyHat

Migrating from NetNut to ProxyHat is mostly a find-and-replace: swap your gateway to gate.proxyhat.com (port 8080 for HTTP, 1080 for SOCKS5), move your country and session parameters into ProxyHat's username flags, and buy prepaid traffic that never expires instead of a monthly commitment. For a typical scraping setup the whole cutover takes well under an hour. This guide maps each NetNut concept to its ProxyHat equivalent, walks through first setup, and gives you an honest pricing comparison so you can size your first purchase correctly.

If you are here because of the July 2 seizure and want the background first, we covered what happened to NetNut and what it means for customers separately. This article is purely practical.

Migrating from NetNut to ProxyHat: The Concept Map

Both platforms follow the same basic architecture — a single gateway host, with routing behavior encoded in the proxy username. That is why the migration is fast. The table below maps the concepts; NetNut details reflect its publicly documented setup before the seizure (for example, gateway gw.ntnt.io and username suffixes like -res-us or -sid-).

Step 1: Create an Account and Buy a Small Test Package

Start with the smallest package — 1 GB for $10 — and treat it as your evaluation budget. Because ProxyHat traffic never expires, there is no penalty for starting small: the gigabyte you buy today is still there next quarter, and volume discounts (down to $3.60/GB at 500 GB) apply whenever you are ready to scale. Full tiers are on the pricing page.

This is a deliberate difference from the commitment model. You do not need to guess your monthly volume correctly on day one to get a fair rate.

Step 2: Swap the Gateway in Your Code

The change is a one-line proxy URL edit. A NetNut-style request:

curl -x http://username-res-us:password@gw.ntnt.io:5959 https://ipinfo.io/json

becomes, on ProxyHat:

curl -x http://user-country-US:pass@gate.proxyhat.com:8080 https://ipinfo.io/json

In Python, the same swap:

import requests

proxies = {
    "http": "http://user-country-US:pass@gate.proxyhat.com:8080",
    "https": "http://user-country-US:pass@gate.proxyhat.com:8080",
}

r = requests.get("https://ipinfo.io/json", proxies=proxies, timeout=30)
print(r.json())

If your stack speaks SOCKS5, the same gateway serves it on port 1080 with identical username flags:

curl -x socks5://user-country-US:pass@gate.proxyhat.com:1080 https://ipinfo.io/json

Run the request a few times: you should see a different residential IP on each request, all geolocated to the country you targeted.

Step 3: Recreate Geo-Targeting and Sticky Sessions

Everything NetNut encoded in username suffixes has a direct equivalent in ProxyHat's username flags:

• Country: append -country-XX to your username — user-country-US, user-country-DE. Coverage is listed on the locations page.
• City: extend the flag with a city — user-country-DE-city-berlin. Useful for city-sensitive work like local SERP tracking (see SERP tracking).
• Sticky session: add a session flag with any identifier you choose — user-session-abc123. Requests carrying the same session string keep the same exit IP while the session stays alive; to force a fresh IP, change the identifier. This replaces NetNut's -sid- mechanism one to one.
• Rotation: the default, exactly as with NetNut — omit the session flag and every request gets a fresh IP, which is what most web scraping workloads want.

Step 4: Recreate Sub-Accounts with Sub-Users

If you used NetNut sub-accounts to separate teams, projects, or end clients, ProxyHat's sub-users cover the same need self-serve: each sub-user gets its own credentials, so you can hand out access per project and keep one client's workload cleanly separated from another's — without going through an account manager to do it. It is worth setting these up during the test phase rather than after, so your usage reporting is split correctly from the first real gigabyte.

If You Used NetNut's Static Residential IPs

For workloads that need the same IP for weeks — account management, marketplace sellers, long-lived logins — the residential pool is the wrong tool on any provider. ProxyHat's equivalent is the ISP static catalog: dedicated static IPs in 66 countries at $11 per 30 days with unlimited traffic, served over both HTTP and SOCKS5. The catalog includes countries that are genuinely hard to source static IPs in, like Nigeria. Browse availability on the locations page.

Pricing: What Changes When Traffic Doesn't Expire

The honest comparison point is effective cost, not sticker price. Under a monthly commitment, every unused gigabyte silently inflates the price of the ones you did use. With non-expiring prepaid traffic, your effective rate is the rate you paid — which is why a $10 first gigabyte can end up cheaper in practice than a larger allowance you only half consume.

Cutover Checklist

• Buy a small package and verify connectivity with the curl one-liners above.
• Run your real workload against your real targets and compare success rates and latency — your domains are the only benchmark that matters.
• Migrate rotating, stateless jobs first; move sticky-session workloads once you have validated session behavior.
• Recreate per-project credentials as sub-users before inviting the team.
• Move any static-IP workloads to the ISP catalog rather than pinning residential sessions long-term.

When the test run holds up, size your next purchase against the volume tier that fits — the traffic will wait for you either way. Start on the pricing page.

Key takeaways:

• The migration is a proxy-URL swap: gate.proxyhat.com, HTTP on 8080, SOCKS5 on 1080.
• NetNut's username suffixes map directly to ProxyHat flags: -res-us → -country-US, -sid-… → -session-….
• Prepaid traffic never expires, so start with 1 GB for $10 and scale into volume rates ($3.60/GB at 500 GB) only when your own tests pass.
• Static-IP workloads belong on the ISP static catalog: 66 countries, $11 per 30 days, unlimited traffic.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does migrating from NetNut to ProxyHat take?

For most setups, under an hour. The proxy URL changes to gate.proxyhat.com (port 8080 for HTTP, 1080 for SOCKS5), and geo-targeting or sticky-session parameters move into username flags like user-country-US or user-session-abc123. Your scraping code otherwise stays the same.

Does ProxyHat support SOCKS5 like NetNut did?

Yes. The same gateway serves HTTP on port 8080 and SOCKS5 on port 1080, with identical username-based targeting on both protocols.

What happens to ProxyHat traffic I don't use?

Nothing — purchased traffic never expires. Unlike monthly commitments where unused gigabytes vanish at the end of the cycle, prepaid ProxyHat traffic stays on your balance until you use it.

Can I get static residential IPs like NetNut offered?

Yes. ProxyHat's ISP static catalog offers dedicated IPs in 66 countries at $11 per 30 days with unlimited traffic over both HTTP and SOCKS5 — including hard-to-source countries like Nigeria.