The intense competition as well as environmental risks on the internet have motivated businesses and websites to come up with ways to protect their internet identities and resources. One innovative way that they came up with is to use a proxy identity to hide their identity whenever they’re trying to access websites. It’s also highly useful in countries where some websites are strictly prohibited or heavily regulated.
Residential proxies are highly useful because it allows the user to choose a specific location and access websites as if the user was a resident of that location or area. Residential proxies act as buffers or intermediaries to protect the identity and security of the user from the general web traffic. If you’ve only learned about proxy servers recently and you want to get your own, go for a list of residential proxy suppliers that you might find useful.
Here’s a brief guide on using and managing residential proxies.
Uses Of Residential Proxies
Residential proxies are used in a wide variety of applications depending on a person’s browsing needs and privacy requirements. Here are some of the common and practical ways residential proxy servers are used:
- Ad Verification
Residential proxies are commonly used to verify and check ads that pop up on your web pages. It enables you to recognize suspicious ads and block them as needed. Ad verification is a critical aspect of brand and reputation management. You might have unscrupulous competitors who will use such ads to tarnish your brand reputation.
- Monitoring And Tracking Of Website’s Ad Content And Traffic
You should look for a residential proxy provider who can help you monitor and track your website’s ad content and traffic. These are legitimate reasons to get residential proxies.
- Web Scraping
Residential proxies are also heavily used in web scraping. They can be used to access the site, which would have otherwise banned certain users who perform bot-like behavior such as harvesting a lot of data.
Managing Residential Proxies
The main advantage of residential proxies is that their IP addresses are borrowed from the machines and devices of real users. This setup makes it so much harder for specific websites to detect the location of proxies. They also make it appear that the searches and interactions are coming from various disparate locations. They also enable proxies to use precise targeting methods. But even with these security features, some users made huge mistakes and downloaded malware apps using their proxies. Below are what you need to consider in managing residential proxies:
1. Pricing Models
Many providers of residential proxy services charge using metered fees. It often makes the residential proxy users take concurrence into account. The level of concurrence depends on how many parallel connections your proxy can make using the existing infrastructure and network.
It’s quite common for residential proxy providers to use the concurrence level or rate before turning to online platforms to calibrate their pricing models. Concurrence refers to the number of parallel connections that can be made out of the different capabilities of your client.
2. Strengths
Here are some of the strengths and advantages of using residential proxies:
- Highly anonymous – One of the best advantages of using residential proxy servers is that they’re highly anonymous. Searches and sessions from residential proxies are very difficult to detect because they connect to the internet using real devices. It makes it difficult to distinguish access and search done by proxy users compared to those who don’t use proxy servers.
Websites will give searches done using residential proxies the benefit of the doubt. Even though some residential proxies perform actions similar to bot footprints, websites are just going to let that pass because they’ll think it’s being done by real users.
- Huge Pool Of Proxies – Another advantage of using residential proxies is that their proxy providers can accept and process huge volumes of requests without using the same IP address twice. Thus, residential proxy providers typically own and manage millions of unique IP addresses.
- Wide range of locations – The millions of IP addresses owned and managed by residential proxy providers gives them a global range of IP addresses, which are also located in millions of locations worldwide.
- High subnet diversity – Another advantage of using residential proxy providers is that it enables you to have a high subnet diversity for your infrastructure and network connectivity, and they rarely share the same subnet. It significantly reduces the likelihood that you might cause an entire range of IP addresses to be blocked altogether.
- Easy To Manage – Residential proxies are quite easy to handle and manage. They use residential servers that look like a URL. The user’s computer uses the address to connect to a proxy server. The proxy server then selects an IP address from among the proxy pool of the provider.
The IP address that the proxy server selected from among the proxy pool will change from time to time. But the address assigned to your proxy server account is going to be the same. And it’s highly convenient if you have to do a lot of web scraping.
- IP Rotation – Another highly useful feature of back connecting proxy servers is that you can use them for IP rotation to rotate IP addresses automatically. You don’t have to do anything from your end. All you have to do is to choose a rotation frequency. Once you’ve done this, the automatic rotation will be performed by the proxy server provider from its end.
3. Weaknesses
Here are some of the weaknesses of using a residential proxy server if not properly managed:
- Can slow down your work – One of the main disadvantages of using residential proxy server is, they can potentially cause your computer system to slow down. Using residential proxy server adds another element or layer and end-point to the connection chain. The element it adds is the physical computer which will link to the proxy server and then to the target websites and URLs.
- Patchy Connection – Another disadvantage of using residential proxy servers is that the connection to the proxy server and/or to the target website could be patchy sometimes, which might lose your connection when the real user disconnects.
- Users Share IP Addresses – Also, using residential proxy servers is that all their multiple, and perhaps thousands if not millions of users, will share the same pool of proxies. They have a large pool of proxies, but they also have numerous client users.
- Expense – Residential proxies are more expensive than data center proxies. They’re typically charged based on traffic volume, not per individual IP. It makes them a bit more expensive than data center proxies
Conclusion
Residential proxies have been very useful because they can route a user’s internet traffic using an intermediary server. The residential proxy server provider simply assigns an alternative IP address. All the user’s requests would be routed through this IP address.
Residential proxies have multiple uses, such as in ad verification, web scraping, SEO compliance, and social media management, among many more applications. They have numerous advantages. And they keep identities and searches classified and easy to manage. But they could slow down your work, have patchy connections, and cost you money if not properly managed.
