Proxy services help cater to your needs by acting as a middleman between the internet and its users. You can set it up to monitor how your kids or employees use the internet, or get a better overall network performance while saving bandwidth for your company. And if you choose the right proxy service provider, you can boost your organization’s privacy as the proxy server can encrypt your web requests.
Things to Know Before Selecting Proxy Services
With such, here are some factors you may want to consider before purchasing from a proxy service provider:
Reputation And Legitimacy
Having cybersecurity measures is important nowadays, and this is one of the reasons why you need a proxy server. Whether you’ll use it for residential or office networks, you need a provider that operates according to high ethical standards. This means they follow security protocols to make your business or residential network free from security risks.
You can check the provider’s website to ensure that they know and adhere to the ethical privacy code. Their website must clearly outline the ethical guidelines because being transparent means they’re aware of such and want potential clients to know of the code.
In addition, they should also comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines. Here, they must ask for your consent before using their IP address to reroute request data to your device.
It’d also be best to ensure that the proxy service provider is a legal entity. Do so by conducting background research, such as checking third-party reviews. For instance, you may want to search on a residential proxy list from trusted review sites. This will help you filter proxy services that may not have a good reputation.
Reviews
If you already have a list of potential proxy service providers, it’s still best to check out their reviews. These include reviews from previous clients, third-party review sites, and ratings from their website or social media pages. Check these reviews to gauge if the provider delivers what they promise.
A provider with more positive reviews may mean they’re reliable. This means clients are satisfied with how they provide their services. Nonetheless, you still need to check out bad reviews about them. Read how the service provider answers and resolves such bad comments to weigh if they’ll be accommodating to issues. If not, you may expect them to do the same if you encounter similar problems with them.
Most importantly, check out reviews that third-party sites have written. Case in point, you may want to read a review about Bright Data and similar companies if it’s a potential provider on your list. This will help you learn more about the company, its services, and the pros and cons since most review blogs are in-depth. You no longer have to scour the proxy service provider’s website to understand what they offer.
Size Of A Provider’s IP Pool
Next is to check the proxy service provider’s internet protocol (IP) pool. There are a smaller number of IP blocks if the provider has a bigger IP pool. Moreover, they can also offer city and country-level targeting if they have more proxies. This is vital if you need to use proxies from specific locations.
Before making a purchase, you should get a list of supported cities and countries from the provider, especially if you need proxies in less popular states. They may offer a wide variety of locations, but your location may not be part of their geo-location coverage.
Further, you must ask them if you can choose the location of a proxy. Some providers assign it randomly, which may prohibit you from picking a specific location.
Features You Need
Besides location coverage, check if the proxy service provider has the features you need. For instance, you may need proxy management tools, filtering systems, and IP rotation functionality. You may need to target exclusive locations or countries, so you need a way to do this and not just a list of IPs from that country.
Another rare functionality is getting IPs from a specific internet service provider’s autonomous system numbers (ASNs). You must ask the provider about it if you need this since not all services have this feature.
Or, if you need proxies that rotate with each connection request, you need IP rotation functionality. This is useful if you conduct web scraping. Although you can get this separately from the provider, it’s still best if they have it already.
Conclusion
Getting a proxy for your home or business may be the best way to secure your network, especially if you consider the abovementioned factors. Many people offer free proxies, but they may not be worth it. It’s still best to go with a paid one that provides security for your network.
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