Country targeting

PacketStream supports country-level targeting. Append _country- and an ISO two-letter country code to the auth key.

Request a country

This password requests a United States exit:

AUTH_KEY_country-US

Use uppercase ISO two-letter codes in new integrations. The proxy hostname and port do not change.

COUNTRY_PASSWORD="${PACKETSTREAM_AUTH_KEY}_country-US"

curl --silent --show-error --fail-with-body \
  --proxy 'https://proxy.packetstream.io:31111' \
  --proxy-user "${PACKETSTREAM_USER}:${COUNTRY_PASSWORD}" \
  'https://ipinfo.io' \
  | jq '{ip, country, region, city, org}'

For a country-sensitive workflow, verify that the returned country is US before collecting the intended destination.

Targeting boundary

Country is the supported targeting boundary. City, region, postal code, and coordinates reported by IP databases are approximate diagnostic data—not targeting guarantees.

The content a destination returns can also depend on:

• browser locale and accepted languages;
• cookies and prior session state;
• account settings;
• the requested hostname or regional URL;
• delivery or billing details supplied to the destination.

A country-targeted exit does not override those application-level inputs.

Unavailable countries

If the requested country has no available exits, PacketStream fails the request. It does not silently substitute another country.

Preserve that distinction in your application:

requested country unavailable → record unavailable work
authentication failed          → stop and fix credentials
destination failed             → apply the destination retry policy

Do not remove the country constraint inside a generic retry handler. That can turn a visible availability failure into plausible data from the wrong market.

Use bounded backoff when retrying availability, and give the job a total time limit.

Combine targeting with a sticky session

Add a session modifier when related requests need the same country-targeted exit:

AUTH_KEY_country-DE_session-market42

The sticky-session contract remains the same: it can retain the exit for up to 60 minutes, and it fails if the associated Packeter disconnects.

Store targeting as job configuration

Record the requested country alongside the collected result. Do not infer it later from a URL or from an approximate IP database response.

A minimal provenance record might include:

{
  "requested_country": "US",
  "observed_country": "US",
  "collected_at": "2026-07-22T14:05:00Z",
  "source_url": "https://example.com/public-page"
}

Avoid placing proxy credentials or auth-key modifiers containing sensitive labels into stored provenance.