Residential proxies are one of the best tools for increasing online privacy and overall cybersecurity improvement. Whether you need it for a bigger brand to protect or for high scale activities such as web scraping, or even for smaller tasks to complete inside your business, you can make use of these tools to accelerate your business growth.
Before deciding whether it is a good product for you to use, you need to figure out the basic things about it.
That is what you will exactly get in this article, so you will be in no need to go anywhere else to grasp the core idea and what’s what with residential proxies and their main uses.
The premise for using proxies
Proxies are intermediary servers that use multiple IP addresses to disguise your original IP and make you anonymous.
When you send a request, it normally is routed through the network of your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Everyone can see where the requests come from because they are being sent from your IP address that is used to communicate between different devices as well as to identify them.
Your IP address contains such information as:
- your general location
- who your ISP is,
- what your hostname is.
That makes you an easy target for surveillance.
The main issue here is that you can get blocked for doing something that might seem suspicious. For instance, if you send too many requests than a regular internet user does, you will be evaluated for possibly using automation software, and that would result in getting your IP banned.
Residential proxies become extremely handy both for avoiding these consequences and for resolving them when they have already occurred.
What does intermediation change?
When you are using an intermediary server, such as a residential proxy, you route all your traffic not through the network of your ISP but rather through that server.
When you send a request, it is intercepted by the proxy server and resent from there. The server gets your request from your IP, but the target to which you are sending your request will get it not from your IP but an IP of a proxy server.
The response is returned the same way. You receive it as if you were using the internet without any intermediation. But this way, you are protected, and no one can either block you or track your activity.
How do residential proxies work?
The main advantage of residential proxies is that they provide the highest level of legitimacy without leaving many options for being tracked.
That comes from the most preeminent feature of this type of proxies. Namely, from the source of the IP addresses that they use. Residential proxies use IP addresses from real physical devices located in residential households. Real users use these addresses from their devices. With residential proxies, you are gaining access to these IPs and using them to resemble the original users of these IPs.
Such nature of residential proxies makes it virtually impossible to identify the very fact that proxies are used here. Any request that you send will seem like it was sent by that user.
Since you are using many IPs and not only one, you will also not be tracked, for different requests will technically belong to separate users. This also means that there is no way you can be blocked for violating any norms set for a regular user because your requests can’t be counted under a single IP any longer.
IP address rotation
One of the key features that allow you to stay anonymous and avoid blocks is rotating your IP addresses. You can send any request from one IP and the other from a different IP. If you are using bots, each of them can send a request from a different IP, making any links between them disappear.
If any of your IPs get blocked, you can unblock the site that blocks it the next moment when you are entering it from a different IP address.
It also means that you can bypass all geo-restrictions. When you want to access content available only for users in a specific country, you can get there with an IP that is allocated to a device in that country. If you want to avoid blocks that exist in your current country, you will only need to use an IP from a different country.
Main use cases
- Web scraping
Residential proxies provide the necessary protection against IP bans when you are scraping the web and collecting lots of publicly available information for your business purposes. Masking your identity allows you to keep IP-based restrictions away and avoid any consequences for using these resources.
Suppose you need to test your software systems before launching them or before putting new updates into work. In that case, residential proxies will help you simulate as realistic traffic as possible, thus making your test results as close to the ones that would show up in a real working environment.
- Ad verification
Residential proxies allow you to verify ads and avoid getting blocked when you want to check for malicious practices and disable any activity of hackers that can compromise your ads. By doing that, you could end up blocked, but not with residential proxies.
- Market research
Whether you need to snoop around your competitors to figure out how they succeed in their marketing strategies, or you want to compare prices in different countries or different sites without getting blocked, residential proxies will save your day.
- Making unlimited purchases
You can use them to make purchases of limited items, for you will bypass certain limitations for a user without getting blocked. You will also enable access to specific prices and items that would not be available for a regular user in your country.
Conclusion
Residential proxies provide the highest level of legitimacy in hiding your identity and resembling different internet users. Since your requests seem like coming from separate users, you are no longer susceptible to IP bans that could be detrimental to your business. That makes residential proxies worth the price.