Overview: six ways to use resident proxies to solve corporate problems

IP address masking may be required for various tasks - from access to blocked content to bypassing anti-search engines and other online resources. I found an interesting post about how this technology can be used to solve corporate problems, and prepared its adapted translation.

There are several options for implementing a proxy:
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• Resident proxies - Residents call IP-addresses, which Internet providers give to homeowners, they are noted in the databases of regional Internet registries (RIR). Resident proxies use exactly such IP, so requests from them are indistinguishable from those sent by real users.
• Server proxy (data center proxy) . Such proxies have nothing to do with Internet providers for individuals. Addresses of this type are issued by hosting providers who have purchased address pools.
• Shared proxy. In this case, one proxy is used by several users simultaneously; can be both server and provided by providers for their users.
• Private proxies . In the case of a private or dedicated (dedicated) proxy, only one user has access to the IP address. Such proxies provide both specialized services, and hosters, Internet providers and VPN-services.

All these options have their advantages, but resident proxies are increasingly used for corporate use. The main reason for this is that such proxies use the real addresses of different Internet service providers in different locations (countries, states / regions and cities). As a result, whoever interacts with, it looks like it is being carried out by a real user. No online service would ever think to block requests from real addresses, because it could be a request from a potential client.

This opens up a number of opportunities for companies. Let's talk about how they use resident proxies to solve business problems.

Why do business proxy

According to Distil Networks, the company that deals with the fight against bots traffic, in today's Internet, up to 40% of web traffic is not generated by people.

At the same time, not all bots are good (like search engines crawlers); site owners seek to protect themselves from many bots in order not to allow them to access data from the resource itself or to learn important information for a business.

The number of bots that are not normally obstructed in 2017 was 20.40%, and another 21.80% of bots were considered “bad”: the site owners tried to ban them.



Why should companies try to circumvent such locks?

Getting real information from the sites of competitors

One of the main uses of resident proxies is competitive intelligence. Today, there are tools that make it easy to track the use of server proxies - pools of addresses of proxy providers are known, so you can easily block them. Many popular online services - for example, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu - implement blocking systems by IP address ranges of hosting providers.

In the case of using a resident proxy, any request looks like it was sent by a regular user. In the event that it is necessary to send a large number of requests, using resident proxies, you can send them from addresses from any countries, cities and related ISPs.

Brand protection

Another practical application of resident proxies is brand protection and anti-counterfeiting. For example, drug makers — say, Viagra — always struggle with counterfeit generic vendors.

Sellers of such replicas usually restrict access to their sites from the countries where the official representative offices of the manufacturer are located: this makes it difficult to identify fake dealers and present them with legal requirements. With the help of resident proxies with addresses from the same country as the website for the sale of counterfeit goods, this problem can be easily solved.

Testing new features and monitoring performance

Another important direction of using resident proxies is testing new functions on their websites or in applications - this allows you to see how everything works with the eyes of a regular user. Sending a large number of requests from IP-addresses from different countries and cities also allows you to test the operation of applications under heavy loads.

This feature is also useful for performance monitoring. For international services, it is important to understand, for example, how fast the site loads for users from certain countries. The use of resident proxies in the performance monitoring system helps to obtain the most relevant information.

Optimization of marketing and advertising

Another use of resident proxies is testing ad campaigns. With a resident proxy, you can see how this or that ad looks, for example, in search results for residents of a certain region and whether it is shown at all.

In addition, when advancing in various markets, resident proxies help to understand how effective, for example, search engine optimization is: whether the site is in the top search engines for the necessary requests in the target languages ​​and how its positions change over time.

Search engines have a very negative attitude towards data collection using their resources. Therefore, they constantly improve the mechanisms for defining data collectors and effectively block them. As a result, the use of data collection from search engines is now completely impossible.

It is impossible to block the execution of a large number of identical search requests through resident proxies - search engines cannot restrict access to real users. Therefore, this tool is great for guaranteed data collection from search engines.

Resident proxies are also useful for analyzing competitors' advertising and marketing activities and their effectiveness. This technology is used both by the companies themselves and by the agencies involved in promotion to order.

Content aggregation

In the era of Big Data, many businesses are built on the aggregation of content from different sites and putting it together on its own platform. Such companies also often have to use resident proxies, otherwise it will be difficult to maintain an up-to-date price database, for example, for goods of certain categories in different online stores: the risk of a ban is too high.

For example, to create a regularly updated comparison table with prices for vacuum cleaners in online stores, you need a bot that will constantly go to the necessary pages of these resources and update them. To bypass the anti-robot systems in this case, the most effective use of this tool.

Collection and analysis of data on order

In the past few years, companies that are professionally engaged in the collection and analysis of data under the order have been actively developing. One of the brightest players in this market - the project PromptCloud - is developing its own crawler tools that collect information for further use in marketing, sales or competitive analysis.

It is logical that the bots of such companies are also constantly banned, but thanks to the use of resident IP it is impossible to do this effectively.

Savings on getting local discounts

Among other things, having private local IP addresses can save resources. For example, many ticket and hotel booking sites display geo-targeted promotions. Only clients from specific regions can use them.

If a company needs to organize a business trip to such a country, then with the help of a resident proxy, it can try to find better prices and save.

Conclusion

The ability to simulate requests from real users with a real local IP address is very useful, including for business. Companies use resident proxies to collect data, various tests, work with the necessary, but blocked resources, and so on.