Security and privacy are primary concerns for the internet user. As technology advances, we also need to adopt modern strategies to ensure privacy. For example, an organization may experience a data breach due to insecurity. This could have a significant impact on businesses and customer sentiments.Â
Similarly, there are various restrictions associated with using the internet. Therefore, as a business owner, there are several benefits of using a proxy server. It is not uncommon for your servers to lag due to the use of many customers. However, proxies can distribute the traffic load across several servers. As a result, this optimized connection leads to increased bandwidth.
Therefore, it becomes crucial to discuss the significance of proxies for business, everything you need to know about the concept, choosing the best proxy services, and FAQs.
A proxy acts as an intermediary between your network traffic and the target website. Since proxies come with IP addresses, they mask your actual one to ensure anonymity and privacy. There are different types of proxies but the most common ones include HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS proxies.
Let us explain how a proxy works with this case: you want to visit Google Scholar from your computer. When you enter your search query, the target website receives the request from your computer. It then returns the search result to your network traffic as the response. However, the website can identify your IP address- a unique number assigned to each device connected to the internet, which allows for transmission of information.Â
Subsequently, the IP address can be used to track your location. Although it may not exactly identify your actual addresses, it can provide an overview of your general location. This would have not been an issue on a good day. However, some content is restricted to users from certain locations. Therefore, once the target website interacts with your IP address and determines your location is not permitted, it returns an error response.Â
However, when you use a proxy, no website, tracking cookie, or third parties can determine your location because the request and response go through the proxy IP address.
Although proxies work by masking and masking your IP address, there are several other reasons why businesses may require proxies. They include:
Since proxies mask your actual IP address, they are crucial in maintaining privacy and security. Therefore, businesses can leverage proxies to hide their identity as they attempt to perform market research, obtain data on competitors, gather insight on sentiment analysis, collect data to monitor brand reputation across several locations and more. Therefore, the use of proxies routes the network traffic through the proxy server IP, which ensures your digital identity is secured.
Another purpose of using proxies is to protect businesses from data leaks. Organizations often store a large amount of data on their computer. Accessing the internet without proxies presents an opportunity for hackers to access sensitive data. This could lead to a lengthy legal situation that may ruin the reputation of the brand. However, a proxy can prevent this from happening by providing an additional layer of security between your network traffic and the internet.
Digital marketing is the core of every online business. Since the world has gone global, traditional ways of advertisement are often less effective as they rarely reach the target audience. Whether your work deals with social media optimization or social media marketing, proxies play a crucial role in optimizing the process.Â
When you are dealing with SEO, proxies mask your IP address such as activities like competitor tracking, keyword research, web scraping, identifying link building opportunities and more. Subsequently, you can do all of these activities without getting detected and blocked by Google.Â
In addition, social media managers often work for various international brands. Therefore, they need to manage all these accounts from one location. It becomes impractical to ask them to use different devices to manage multiple accounts. However, using proxies allows them to effectively change their IP address to manage these accounts from one location.
Residential proxies from a reliable provider are the ideal option for managing multiple social media accounts. With these proxies, you can choose a specific country and access the internet like you are in that location. Therefore, proxies offer the flexibility and ease required for social media management and optimized digital marketing strategies. Â
Another crucial application of proxies for business is ad verification. If you often surf the internet, you’ll realize that the ads you get change according to your search queries. In addition, Google presents ads to users based on location. Therefore, someone in Africa will most likely not get the same ads as someone in Asia.Â
So, if you are in Asia and you want to expand your target market to Africa, you need to understand the kind of ads to use. Therefore, you need to use a proxy with an IP address located in Africa that allows you to monitor and verify ads. In addition, you can use proxies for ad tracking, content compliance, and media monitoring. All these are important because malicious parties may create similar ads to that of your brand, which can negatively affect brand reputation. Â
Pricing is a crucial aspect of every business. As much as the aim of organizations is to generate revenue through increasing profits, pricing has to be critically considered to avoid losing customers. Therefore, competitive pricing is a crucial aspect of keeping customers. It involves providing products/services at competitive prices without compromising on quality.Â
Overpricing your goods or services will eventually scare potential customers into the arms of your competition. Likewise, you don’t want to under-price your products so that the quality will be in question. As a result, you need proxies to gather sales intelligence in real-time so you can make appropriate changes to optimize your business operations.Â
Subsequently, sales intelligence is crucial for operations like market analysis, price monitoring and price comparison. Doing this involves using automated programs or bots to access competitor’s websites. However, these websites can detect and block your actions if too many requests are coming from the same IP address.
When you use rotating proxies, the website perceives it as multiple requests coming from multiple sources. As a result, chances of being blocked significantly reduced.
One of the crucial steps in building a responsive app or website is to test it. Testing is necessary to ensure the software works as intended. Many modern organizations have websites and apps to promote positive user experience. As an international cooperation, there is a need to see how the program works for different users in various locations. In addition, sending multiple requests from different locations allows for assessment of the performance of the server under high load.
Therefore, you can use proxies originating from various countries to test software and assess its performance. Subsequently, the result of the assessment will determine if corrective actions are necessary to adjust for the software behavior. Resolution of any issues before going live is a crucial strategy to avoid significant losses in customers and revenues.Â
Data has become the cornerstone of decision-making in many thriving organizations. However, manually getting the data is only effective for small-scale data collection. This is because businesses often use a large amount of data for analysis, interpretation, and visualization. In addition, manual data extraction is prone to human errors as well as being time and resource intensive.
Therefore, in recent years, web scraping bots have been used by individuals and organizations to effectively gather large volumes of data within a few minutes. Web scraping can be applied for several use cases, including:
However, for successful web scraping, you need premium proxies with auto-rotating features so your requests are not coming from the same IP address. In addition, you should implement delays so that the web scrapers activities will mimic human activities.
The use of premium proxies can make all the difference for your business especially for web scraping activities. However, you have to consider factors like speed, IP pool size, cost, CAPTCHA-solving solutions, customer support, and more when choosing a proxy provider.Â
NetNut is an industry-leading proxy service provider. With an extensive network of over 85 million rotating residential proxies in 195 countries and over 1 million mobile IPs in over 100 countries, you can scrape data from any website with ease.
NetNut rotating residential proxies can hide your IP address so the website can only interact with the proxy IP. Subsequently, rotating your IP makes it look like you are sending various requests from different locations, which minimizes the chances of being blocked.
NetNut residential proxies come with CAPTCHA-solving software to ensure the website does not identify your automated activities. In addition, it allows you to bypass geographical restrictions, which ensures timely access to data.Â
If you want to scrape data using your mobile device, NetNut’s Mobile Proxy uses real phone IPs for efficient web scraping and auto-rotates IPs for continuous data collection. Whether you are a big business or a small business, you can leverage our in-house solution- NetNut Scraper API. In addition, NetNut stands out for its transparent and competitive pricing system- you pay only for data that you receive. Register today to enjoy a 7 days free trial if you want to take your business to the next level.
This article has examined proxies and their significance to businesses. Modern organizations rely on up-to-date data that can be used for sales intelligence, price optimization, competitor monitoring, and more. These activities may be challenging without the use of proxies as they work to provide an additional layer of security by masking your actual IP address.Â
Therefore, it is crucial to get premium proxies that guarantee security, anonymity, and privacy. NetNut offers various proxy solutions for professionals, business owners, and individuals.Â
Contact us today to get started!
The most common use case of proxies is web scraping- collecting large volumes of data from various websites within a few minutes. Subsequently, the data is sorted and organized and used for crucial decision-making or machine training data. Some of the applications of web scraping include data extraction, market analysis, testing, sales intelligence, and optimizing ranking.
Businesses can either use residential or datacenter proxies to mask their actual IP address. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the differences between these two IPs. Residential IPs are associated with actual homes, which makes them easy to pass as a natural connection. As a result, using rotating residential proxies is an ideal strategy to avoid getting blocked.Â
On the other hand, data center proxies use IPs that originate from datacenters. They are usually faster than residential but prone to easy detection and blocking. However, residential proxies are often more expensive as they are a more reliable source of IPs.Â
The legal status of proxy use is still a gray area. Businesses can use proxies to collect publicly available data- this is a legal use. However, proxies can also be used to bypass geographical restrictions as well as unblock websites. These activities may be deemed illegal in countries with strict policies, like China and North Korea.Â