When you simply need to hide your location, any proxy will do. But if you need to appear like a resident of a certain place on Earth, you need a so-called residential proxy that identifies you as one. If you need to switch your mock locations often, it’s time to search for a residential proxies provider and find the one that suits your needs best.
Why Anyone Would Need a Residential Proxy?
There are many situations when a regular user, an Internet professional or a business manager needs a residential proxy to pretend they are from a certain place in the world. Here are some examples:
- You want to visit a site that is only available for residents of a certain country;
- you want to see the prices of a certain product for the residents of that country, county, or any location;
- you design a site and want to see it through the eye of a resident of some location;
- you run an ad campaign and want to check whether ads are region-relevant.
The two latter situations may require switching lots of locations (that is, residential proxies) or contacting your site from hundreds and thousands of IP’s just to make sure it is read as a regular influx, not as a DDoS attack. In addition, you may want to check how the site or the campaign looks from various parts of a country. For multilingual countries like Canada, Switzerland, or India, you may even adjust the language settings, so your pages or ads show in languages specific for certain regions.
A regular mobile proxy can help you see sites banned by your company or authorities, but they won’t provide this level of precision.
How to Choose the Provider?
There are many providers that offer you residential proxies in all the parts of the world, except for maybe North Korea and some unrecognized quasistates. Their services are paid, and you might have heard about free proxies available on special sites, with even proxy check tools. Though these free offers are sort of seductive, there are some reasons to prefer paid ones. Here are some of them:
- Quality. Though you may only get a limited volume of data for your money, this volume is granted.
- Speed. Your connection will be much faster than with free proxies or VPNs.
- Support. Maybe it won’t really work 24/7, but support managers will hear you and react.
- Uptime. It’s normal to have 99.99% and higher uptime for a commercial proxy. Free ones may fail at any moment.
- Legal status. Both parties have their rights, duties, and responsibilities defined in the contract. With a free proxy, its service comes with no guarantee and no responsibility. It could be tolerated if it didn’t involve the personal data you transfer.
When choosing among paid proxies, pay attention to the following details:
- Region support. Does it offer you servers in the regions you need?
- Uptime. Even the greatest service isn’t worth a thing if it doesn’t function.
- Pricing. We don’t want to save fanatically, but neither do we want to overpay for features we don’t need.
- Payment methods. Some of them can be easier for you.
- Support. You may need it 24/7, especially if you operate in remote time zones and choose their daytime for your activity.
Make a Choice Now
Given all the above, first you need to know what your business or activity really requires. According to this, you can write down your requirements. And the residential proxy provider that has it all for a reasonable price is the one to choose.
