Residential proxies are one of two major types of proxies, the other being datacenter proxies. They are both crucial for business operations, and while their main focus is to provide better anonymity and security, each has different qualities that better serve specific goals.
In this article, we will discuss the nature of residential proxies and what it entails for business use. Then we can figure out what additions and improvements they bring to the table and how they can help with the efficiency and success of your work.
What do they do?
Residential proxies are intermediary servers that use IP addresses from physical devices located in households of real users. When you use such a proxy, you connect to the internet not through a typical network given by your Internet Service Provider but through a proxy server that routes all your traffic.
From now on, your IP address is concealed. Every request you send will reach its target by being resent from one of those household IPs. Your proxy providers know your original IP address, but everybody else can see only the IP that a proxy uses to forward your requests.
One of the more significant advantages of this proxy type is that it provides a tremendous variety of IP addresses. Proxies rotate these IPs and allow you to make your different requests seem like they were sent from separate internet users.
Benefits of using residential proxies
This feature provides certain advantages:
- Your traffic can’t be tracked under a single IP address,
- You can circumvent IP blocks with new IPs that constantly rotate,
- Your location can’t be identified because new IPs indicate different places.
It all comes down to staying anonymous while surfing the internet. When you can’t be identified, you can’t be blocked either. You can continue completing tasks that are important to your business without having to deal with concerns about potential restrictions that might compromise your brand’s future by constantly disorganizing your workflow.
Improvements for business
The ability to stop government surveillance and tracking practices on sites that you need to use for your business can catapult you to new heights in your work success.
Let’s see where that can be exploited most effectively.
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Avoiding CAPTCHAs
If you are sending too many requests in a short period, you will notice that CAPTCHA tests, where you must confirm that you are not a robot, will appear more often. Because more requests resemble automation that works extremely fast, you are being checked.
But when you are using proxies, different requests can’t be counted under the same IP address, for they are sent from different IPs. It means that you will improve your work speed, especially if you are scraping the web. You will not need to stop for these tests so often.
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Accessing geo-restricted content
The variety of IP addresses that residential proxies provide will let you access virtually everything that is accessible in any country on the internet. Residential proxies can offer country, city, or state-level geo-location targeting.
Suppose you need to check whether your competitors are setting different prices in separate regions or need to access certain resources available only to limited users from specific countries. In that case, you will do that without any trouble.
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Review monitoring
When you can’t scrape the web freely and must deal with blocks, you will not collect enough data about your product reviews or the ones about your competitors. Proxies allow you to bypass all IP bans and continue harvesting data without risking getting blocked again. This helps improve engagement with your customers and prepare for future trends that will shape the market.
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Load testing
Residential proxies can be used for load testing on your applications or sites. When you want to see how much traffic your server can withstand and be prepared for the real situation, you need to simulate that traffic that closely resembles the load of real users entering your server.
Since residential proxies use IP addresses from household devices, there’s no better way to create real traffic than by employing these proxies. They come from devices in different geo-locations and with different operating systems. That will make your traffic as genuine as it gets.
Your testing will provide more accurate results and help you improve your server before accidents happen when it crashes from a load too heavy for it.
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Ad verification
Residential proxies can help verify ads because they allow access to geo-restricted content and stay anonymous. Ad verification can be completed without getting banned on different sites and leaving the ads messed up with fraudulent insertions.
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Travel-fee aggregation
Scraping for the best prices and traveling offers that include hotels, transport, tickets, and whatnot is the thing that can get you banned. If you are engaging in this activity and want to provide the best offers for your customers, you must use proxies, and residential ones are the best fit for it. You will access the offers worldwide and collect the data without any restrictions or blocks.
Conclusion
Residential proxies provide your business with more security and anonymity that allows you to stay untraceable and virtually impossible to block while imitating the traffic of many different internet users with IPs originating from devices in residential areas. This can be used in load testing or to access content on the internet without needing to stop for CAPTCHA checkups.
