Premium Proxies : Where to Find Them

Most proxies you’ll find on the web even the very expensive ones are not really suitable for business purposes. The problem is that premium proxies need decent infrastructure, support staff and high quality IP addresses.

What is a Proxy?

A proxy is a virtual machine that allows its user to appear as if they are connecting to a server located inside that proxy’s country. It’s able to hide the real user’s IP address and hence location. Using a proxy allows people to maintain multiple digital identities and maintain a level of anonymity not normally possible online.

The proxying process enables the user to gain access to blocked content and websites by hiding their internet protocol (IP) address. This also means they cannot be traced back to the true place they are connecting from. Each proxy has at least one unique IP address, which makes it harder to track them down by these network addresses.

Common proxy server uses

A proxy server can be traced back to a number of different types of programs. A proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary between an Internet user and another computer system. Often, a proxy server is used to allow a computer on a private network to access information on a public network. It can work as an intermediate server that accepts connections from clients and forwards the data to its destination without revealing any of the clients connected to it.

There are many, many uses for proxies most of them associated with using the internet. Proxies were originally used primarily by businesses to act as gateways to different applications and resources. Nowadays though their use is more focussed on online activities like data collection, e-commerce and internet marketing.

What is a Premium Proxy?

This is simply any sort of high quality proxy server which is suitable for important tasks online. The vast majority of proxies people buy are run on underpowered servers and use IP addresses which are mostly blocked and filtered online. All the ‘free proxies’ available online for example are very quickly abused and used for dubious and even criminal activities. Unfortunately if other use these proxies their connections will be tarnished with the same reputation.

Premium proxies will sit on fast, secure servers usually housed in datacenters equipped with high availability bandwidth. However the most crucial component of any premium proxy is the quality, location and classification of the IP addresses that it uses.

Premium proxies are servers which provide users with a private IP address to gain Internet access. With a premium proxy, users can browse websites at will without worrying about the privacy of their personal information. This can be extremely beneficial to people who use work computers a lot, or to students who need to visit a website without parents or teachers knowing. As a Web Unblocker, such as a Premium Proxy, you can also change your IP address.

Residential IPs

All Ip address ranges are classified by how they are assigned. For instance huge ranges are assigned to colleges and Universities which are classified as educational. Other categories include government, military. commercial and residential.  they can also be classified by location – so UK proxies, Californian proxies and so on.

Websites can tell an awful lot about the user based on how their IP address is classified. This will also affect how their connections are treated and monitored too. Basically if you’re trying to do any sort of market research, data collection or conduct any sort of transactions then it’s vital to appear to be a normal consumer/web surfer. The easiest way to do this is to connect from an IP address in a range registered as residential.

Unfortunately the vast majority (95%+) of proxies use IP addresses from commercially registered ranges. When a proxy uses one these addresses to connect to a website then it’s easily identifiable as a proxy or VPN connection. A premium proxy needs to use an IP address range registered to either home or mobile connections in order to stay anonymous and hidden.

Fresh proxies

The other difficulty with standard proxies is that their IP addresses have been used and shared by thousands of people over many years. Commercial proxy services are often very low cost and can be used relatively cheaply.

The cheaper proxies will have had thousands of people using their IP addresses for all sorts of tasks. Many of these will be completely legitimate but others will use for spamming, hacking and to cover their tracks from fraudulent transactions.

This means that many of these IP addresses are blacklisted and will have many problems when connecting especially to websites with strong security protections. Even if they haven’t been used for illegal activities IP addresses which have been used excessively on all sorts of sites will have poor reputations.

Fresh proxies refer to proxy servers which use IP addresses not used previously on other proxies. This means that they won’t be flagged as suspicious or appear on the many web blacklists in existence. Not surprisingly these IP addresses come at a premium price because they haven’t been previously exploited.

Any premium proxy should really have these ‘fresh ip addresses’ to be effective and safe.

Full Randomness

For many business tasks a proxy should ideally have access to a large number of IP addresses. This is essential if you’re trying to run multiple accounts or multiple identities online. If you use the same IP address for example to manage and promote multiple social media accounts you’re going to cause lots of problems with those accounts.

For many business people for example use proxies to buy multiple items like sneakers or tickets which are in short supply. In order to do this, they use multiple accounts which must be spread across different IP addresses. Using sequential addresses from the same IP address range is extremely risky as it makes these accounts very easy to spot.

To impersonate multiple users effectively there should be some element of randomness to the addresses used by your proxy. Obviously you don’t want them spread all over the world especially if geo-targeting is a problem but ideally they should not be directly linked with each other.

This is again down to your proxy provider and why the bigger companies are much more able to provide this variety or apparent randomness in the IP addresses provided.  The largest proxy provider is called Bright Data (formerly Luminati) and has a network of over 72 million residential IP addresses alone !