Hey everyone,

I’m running into a wall deploying a Selenium setup to Render and could use some insights.

Setup:

• FastAPI service
• undetected-chromedriver + selenium-stealth
• Works perfectly on local macOS (non-headless, normal ISP IP)
• On Render: forced to use --headless=new (no root → no Xvfb)

What’s happening on Render:

• Chrome launches fine
• Page immediately returns Access Denied
• Even a simple urllib request to the login URL returns 403 before Selenium runs

This makes me think it’s IP-level blocking (likely via Akamai Bot Manager) rather than just browser fingerprinting.

What I’ve tried:

• Matching navigator.platform + WebGL renderer to Linux
• Removing --disable-gpu
• Using --headless=new (Chrome 146)
• undetected-chromedriver patches (navigator.webdriver etc.)

Questions:

1. Is a residential proxy alone enough in this case, even with headless Chrome?
2. Or will Akamai still flag the session due to headless/browser fingerprint mismatches?
3. Any real-world experience with providers like BrightData / Oxylabs / Smartproxy against Akamai?
4. Is there any way to run non-headless Chrome on Render without Docker/root access?

The automation itself works fine locally — the only issue is getting past blocking in the deployed environment.

Would really appreciate any insights or war stories from folks who’ve dealt with this
Thanks!