Residential proxies can be defined as intermediaries that act as buffers to protect users from general web traffic. They are an excellent tool for businesses to gather and analyze data, compare products and prices online, and amplify their market reach without getting detected by the websites. Depending upon the proxy provider, an ideal residential proxy supports the option of targeting countries and cities and must be Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) encrypted for security purposes. Besides concealing your identity, residential proxies also help in web scraping, ad verification, and SEO research.
How do residential proxies work?
Residential proxies channel your internet traffic through an intermediary server. A proxy provider allocates you an alternative IP address (that is not visible to the website) through which all your server requests are directed. Here, the server’s main objective is to conceal your real IP and generate a pseudo-residential address so that sites track your activity as that of any regular user.
Types of residential proxies
There are mainly two types of residential proxies:
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Rotating Proxies
Also known as back connect proxies, residential proxies hide you behind a pool of other proxies that keep switching between themselves with every session. Being fast and flexible, rotating proxies make it difficult for the server to track your actual IP and help you access the web anonymously. However, you must make sure that your proxy provider has a big pool of proxies so that the same IPs are not repeated.
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Dedicated Proxies:
Dedicated proxies allow only a single user or device to connect and send requests. You can use such proxies to browse the web and play games. Moreover, dedicated proxies are also useful if you want to make two social media accounts or do paid surveys.
Reasons to use a residential proxy
You might often find the need to hide your IP address for various reasons. It can be for uploading or downloading torrents via P2P connections, running different accounts from the same device, or scraping data from various websites. No matter what the case is, a residential proxy is the best tool to hide your true online identity. It assigns valid, residential IPs that work to hide you from servers to maintain Internet anonymity.
While at it, note that the search engines will only allow you to make a limited number of requests from the same IP per minute. Hence, these types of single server setups can significantly limit your browsing options, and if you exceed the given rate, they may even get banned.
What are the uses of residential proxies?
Now that you’re quite aware of what residential proxies are, it is a good time to understand how they can be used to work around different problems and help automate your business. Here are some common uses of residential proxies:
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Market Price Monitoring
To fetch potential clients, it is important to keep up with the market pricing trends. Overpricing your products and services can make you lose customers, while underpricing
can get customers to doubt your quality. With residential proxies, you can use sales intelligence tools that gather, monitor, and compare timely market prices to help you make the best decision regarding your business sales.
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Web Scraping and Internet Marketing
Internet marketing is much more than ads and social media posts. To gain a competitive advantage, you’ll need to study your competitors and understand their ways. The best way to analyze your competitor’s info is by web scraping. For this, you can use residential proxies, which continuously rotate IPs and allow you to do large-scale scrapping on many giant sites like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Social Media Management
Social media is the face of modern web marketing and thousands of small and large business owners are leveraging it for their benefit. Meanwhile, residential proxies have made it easier for users to create multiple social media accounts and manage them seamlessly to promote and grow their business.
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Accessing geo-blocked content
Many service providers geo-lock content which can only be accessed from certain countries or locations. Residential proxies help you to stream geo-restricted sites without getting flagged. While at it, know that some providers have blocked IPs; hence, make sure to check and verify your package before making a payment.
Takeaway:
Residential proxies can be of great benefit if and when used wisely. However, before buying residential proxies, strive to know why you need residential proxies. Do you actually need to spend so much when maybe you could manage with just a cheap proxy package? This will help you be mindful of what you invest in.
