The internet has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Not only us, but most modern businesses also depend entirely on it for their operations to thrive. With more and more business organizations utilizing the internet to create a vast audience reach, consumer data are almost everywhere. That said, it makes them prone to cyberattacks and privacy issues.
Luckily, technologies like residential proxies allow businesses to explore the internet and run their operations safely. So if you’re looking for a huge database of proxies, you have many options to choose from in the market today.
This article shares the basics of residential proxies and various reasons businesses should use them.
Understanding Residential Proxies
A residential proxy allows you to choose a physical location and browse the web as if you are in that chosen area.
From a more technical perspective, proxies act as a substitute IP address that protects users by concealing their actual IP address. So, when you’re surfing the net, all search requests you make are directed via the proxy IP to the proxy server and the resource server.
This way, all your activities on the web are hidden so that you can maintain an anonymous identity. A proxy seller often leases residential proxies to businesses, and some of them can have preferred locations, cookies of their own, and browser information.
Four Reasons To Use Residential Proxies
- Ensure Business Security
Cybersecurity issues and hackers keep on growing and becoming more sophisticated every year. As more businesses move to the digital realm, we can only expect the numbers to rise.
A cybersecurity best practice is to use proxies. As your business relies on the Internet to operate, you and your employees are exposing your company’s IP address, making your business vulnerable to cyberattacks.
A residential proxy for business offers an extra layer of security between external web traffic and company servers. Hackers won’t easily access your actual server and will reach your proxy server instead.
- Competitive Analysis
Perhaps one of the most significant use cases of a residential proxy is to gather reliable information from your competitors. Competitor analysis requires extensive scraping of other websites. You’ll need to collect data and information over a long time. And in most cases, high-ranking websites use several sophisticated tactics to hide the information you need. Some also block entire ranges of IP addresses that belong to specific providers.
However, residential proxies can help bypass these methods. Using a residential proxy, any request you make will look like it’s sent by a real person. Also, if you need to send numerous requests, a residential proxy can allow sending these requests from different IP addresses from any city and country.
Since you appear as a regular visitor trying to purchase their service or product, there’s no risk of being fed with wrong data or getting blocked.
The anonymity allows you to gain better insights to stay ahead of your competitor.
- Optimizing Marketing Efforts
Testing allows you to ensure maximum ROI from your marketing and ad campaigns. Residential proxies can be helpful in this case.
For instance, residential proxies allow you to see how a specific online ad looks in search results for a user from a particular location.
It also helps assess the impact of your local SEO efforts, whether determining if your website hits the top rankings for a specific keyword or how a webpage’s ranking changes over time.
In general, search engines don’t like it when someone collects data using their technology and infrastructure. That’s why companies, such as Google, are constantly developing anti-bot systems that make it challenging to gather data directly from a search.
However, using residential proxies allows you to send multiple search requests without being flagged as a bot by search engines.
- Software Testing And Monitoring
A residential proxy can also help test new features of your website or mobile app. With it, developers can see how new features work for clients in various locations.
In addition, sending a large number of requests using numerous residential IP addresses can test your software’s behavior in case of a high load. And it also helps in solving the issue of crashing due to massive web traffic. Proxy servers can reroute the traffic to other web servers and provide users with a lag-free browsing experience.
Consequently, a residential proxy also helps in monitoring website performance, especially for international businesses. It allows them to discover how fast a user from a specific country accesses their website or mobile app.
Takeaway
Proxy networks have become a necessity in these modern times. Businesses now rely on residential proxies that allow them to practice safe internet operations, ensure online privacy, maximize market reach, and more.