In todays world, people and businesses have become more reliant online. With this increasing digital activity, you need tools that can help protect you while browsing online, including proxies.
Proxies have been here for some time now and are commonly used to keep browsing activities private. Think of proxies as middlemen between the internet and the users.
Several types of proxies are available, including data center proxy, dedicated proxy, public or private proxy, and shared proxy, each having its best use cases. However, residential proxies are by far the best type for most use cases.
Residential Proxies: What Are They?
To understand residential proxies, you first need to learn about residential IP. An IP address is a unique string of characters to identify an individual device when connecting to a network.
A residential IP is an IP assigned to a specific device or a phone or computer. This IP provides information about the device, its approximate location, and the internet service provider (ISP). Since residential IPs are associated with a single device and its user, they are considered real people on the internet.
That said, a residential proxy is an intermediary residential IP address borrowed from devices of a real user. This separates residential proxies from other types of proxies that may use non-physical IP addresses or forward connection requests.
You may find free proxies available online. But reliable and effective residential proxies will always cost you.
Why Use A Residential Proxy?
1. To Provide Anonymity
The main reason people and businesses use a residential proxy is to stay anonymous when browsing online. Residential proxies help hide and change a users IP address online. Websites rely on IP addresses to identify a device and its location to control user access.
For instance, you cant watch Disney+ if youre located in the Philippines. Typically, you can use VPNs to solve this issue. However, some websites can tell that youre connecting via VPN or a datacenter IP proxy. Youll be blocked or served false information.
A residential proxy is much more difficult to identify. Since your connection seems like a real device in a specific location, web services will consider you a regular user. Thus, you can freely watch or access restricted or controlled content and websites online.
2. To Enhance Security
Cybersecurity threats and attacks keep growing, and hackers only become more sophisticated every year. In fact, statistics show that 2021 will have 50% more cyber-attacks per week on business networks compared to 2020.
As more businesses adapt to the digital world, its expected that the numbers will continue to rise. Using residential proxies can help reduce your security riskwhether for business or personal use. With the increased reliance on the internet, youre exposing your IP address and making your personal device or business vulnerable to attacks.
Residential proxies can provide an extra layer of security between your business servers or personal device and the external web traffic. This way, hackers wont have easy access to your actual server, reaching your proxy server instead.
3. To Scrape The Web
Web scraping extracts data from a website. And in this modern world, data is a critical part of every business to scale and thrive. By scraping the web, you can survey the digital market, scope out your competition and take advantage of the most powerful SEO strategies.
Unfortunately, IP limits and restrictions can make web scraping difficult. However, using residential proxies that use and rotate through residential IP networks helps you bypass access limits and allows you to get the data you need.
Take note, however, that you should never make many requests to the servers at once. If you scrape large amounts of data at once, youll most likely be blocked even when using residential proxies.
4. To Test And Monitor Websites
Residential proxies are a valuable tool for both web developers and business owners to text and monitor website performance.
Using a residential proxy, developers can see and experience how new web features work for users in various locations. It helps in monitoring website performance in terms of international access. This allows developers to learn how fast a user from a different country accesses the website.
Other than that, residential proxies can test the behavior of your website during high traffic by sending a large number of requests from multiple residential IP addresses. This can help developers identify and solve web crashes due to massive traffic.
Take Away
In this modern world, proxies have become a reliable, go-to solution for common internet woes.
Of all the types of proxies, residential proxies are most suitable for any use case. It can help you provide a safe internet experience and other benefits!