This is a simple guide, in the form of a checklist that you must consider before buying private proxies for you or for your business. Before starting to buy proxies, or even before considering any type of proxies, you must first consider a few elements. You can create a checklist of the items found in this article, so once you complete it, you will know exactly what private proxies to buy and what to look for and where.
What are private proxies and what do they do
Private proxies are proxies sold by a proxy provider. And the user of a private proxy buys it to hide his real IP in order to stay anonymous online and increase its privacy.
A private proxy, once setup in your browser, app or system will divert all the traffic through its proxy server. And every website to which you will connect through the private proxy will not be able to recognize your IP. Thus you will be able to stay anonymous.
It is always recommended to use a privacy tool, either a private proxy or a virtual private network. But even if they have the same goal or hiding your IP, a private proxy and a VPN will achieve it differently. This is why it is important for you to understand the factors that you need verify before actually buying proxies.
Checklist 1: Do you need private proxies?
The first thing you should consider is if you need private proxies. A private proxy is required when using a single IP for a task raises the risk of blocking your IP or triggering extra security checks from the website or web platform that you are trying to connect to. This is why, before buying proxies, consider if all the tasks you need to perform can be done from a single IP. And if the answer is yes, then do not buy proxies as they will not help you. However, if your answer is no and you need proxies, then this checklist is yes, you need private proxies.
Checklist 2: Personal or business use
The next item on our checklist is what do you need private proxies for? Are you going to use them for your personal use, to increase your privacy and anonymity or you need private proxies for your business, so you can access certain restricted resources or increase the number of requests you need to perform to a certain web server, without risking an IP block?
Business uses for private proxies involve usually developing scraping tools, web scrapers, crawlers or scaling or operations. By scaling, it is understood that as you use one IP address you will use multiple IPs.
Checklist 3: Is your browser setup for proxy use
Some users, both for their personal and business use will consider a browser as the environment that they will use to divert their traffic through private proxies.
In other words, setting a browser through private proxies means that everything you access through that browser will be through the proxy’s IP. Whereas any other desktop app on your machine will use your system’s IP.
The recommended browser to be used with private proxies is Mozilla Firefox as it allows you to setup proxies only for it. In comparison, Google Chrome, the other browser giant does not allow such configuration and you need to divert your whole system through proxy’s IP.
So, if you plan on using your private proxies manually, use Mozilla Firefox. Moreover, the proxy configuration for Mozilla Firefox is easy to do and it requires only a couple of minutes.
Checklist 4: Third party apps that allow proxy setup
There are some users, business ones in particular that need to use their private proxies through third-party apps or for software developed in-house. These users can’t use the system’s proxy setup because they need several tens or hundreds of proxies to be accessed by their software.
Therefore, before buying private proxies, if you are going to use a tool that makes requests to other web servers, check if it needs private proxies and if you can set the tool (or app) to channel its traffic through proxy servers.
Checklist 5: Do you need IP randomization and proxy refresh
Another factor to consider is if your private proxy usage will trigger any sort of IP blocks. If it does, you must buy a private proxy package from a provider that offers monthly randomization. Therefore, if by chance some of your private proxies are banned from a certain website, you can ask your provider to refresh your proxies and issue another set of IPs for them.
Friday, November 17, 2017
