6 signs you need shared proxies

Most often than not, you and your projects will require using private proxies or virgin proxies to perform certain tasks. However, this is not the case for every project. There are some projects in which you can actually user shared proxies. These are private proxies that are used by two or more users. So in other words, you rent the proxy together with someone else. The main advantage of buying shared proxies over dedicated private proxies is that the former ones are cheaper than the later. However, the drawback is that shared proxies divide also their performance and risk with the other users of the proxy server. If you are in doubt over which proxies to use for your business, follow this guide to check if your business really needs shared proxies instead of dedicated ones.

1. Shared proxies for automation

If you developed a web automation tool and you need to access other web services, then you will most likely need some kind of proxies to mask your real IP and perform queries from other IP. This is where you can use shared proxies. If you only need a generic way of masking your IP and you need to do this with many IPs then shared proxies are the best option for you.

2. You developed a web scraper

Everybody loves web scrapers. They can do within minutes or hours the tasks that a human will require days or even weeks. However, if you need your scraper to scan and scrape only a limited number of domains, then you risk flagging your IPs if the scraper is making too many requests per second.

Even in this case, the solution is to use shared private proxies. This can be easily set into a web scraper and divert most or all the scraper’s requests through different IPs located around the world. Another benefit of using shared proxies for scraping is that target websites will never guess that their domains were accessed by a scraper. Thus, the content rendered for your requests will be similar to that returned for a human visitor. Moreover, with the help of shared proxies, because requests are always diverted through different IPs, target websites will not be able to consider your requests as crawling.

3. Your business is SEO intensive

Another area in which you should consider using shared proxies is search engine optimization. If you need to scrape search engines or to create backlinks on various domains, forums or blogs, then you can use shared proxies to divert your traffic and protect your real IP.

Another reason for which you need shared proxies or even SEO proxies is to create backlinks from different IPs. Because if you create all your links from the same IP, domains, webmasters and even Google could flag your business as a spam and not allow links posting towards your website. So in other words, if you use shared proxies, you will protect your SEO efforts.

4. Shared proxies when no accounts are involved

This is more of a general condition. If you need shared proxies and there is no account required to access or perform certain online tasks, then you can certainly use shared proxies.

Let’s consider the opposite case, where you need accounts to perform certain tasks. Such as in social media, where you need social media proxies with virgin IPs to protect your accounts. And avoid any bans because nobody will be using your social media proxies because they are dedicated ones, allocated only to you.

5. You need volume more than quality

You need shared private proxies when you must make a large volume of requests. So any project you are developing now, if it makes a large number of requests to other web services, then you are better off buying shared proxies and use as many IPs as you can buy for your budget. Moreover, if you need more proxies on a consistent basis, you can ask your proxy provider to refresh your shared proxy’s IP as most providers offer this feature.

6. Shared proxies for location testing

Have you ever consider the differences in content offered by websites depending on the visitor’s IP address? Most websites are doing this, diverting the user to a local subdomain. However, if you are not happy with this thing or if you need to research differences in content, then you can use shared proxies and access a target website from different IP address. And the website will return the real content it offers visitors from those areas. This is a handy trick especially for testing search engine ranking positions or restricted content.