The Usefulness of Business Residential Proxy Services

Although almost every company today relies on the internet to conduct business, many companies do not understand why they should use proxies or how to use them to their advantage. Business residential proxy services can be an essential tool and a major benefit to your company in various ways.

Read on to learn more about business residential proxy services, including:

• What residential proxies are
• What they are used for, and some possible use cases for business residential proxy services
• The advantages of using business residential proxy services
• How to avail yourself of a free residential proxy trial and more

What Is a Residential Proxy?

For the uninitiated, a proxy server is a remote computer that acts as an intermediary between the internet user and the web pages they visit on the world wide web. Proxy servers act as a buffer that protects the user, adding a layer of security by masking the user’s actual internet protocol (IP) address, which is a unique string of characters that identifies your internet connection.

What does this mean? By using a proxy, your internet request does not go directly to the website you are visiting. Instead, the proxy reroutes your web request, making it seem as if it is coming from a different IP address. This thereby hides your true IP address.

Specifically, a residential proxy makes your web request appear to come from an IP address that belongs to an individual or residential internet user instead of a business. This type of proxy is assigned to a specific physical location, whereas a data center proxy is an IP address assigned to a server in a data center.

Many people use the terms “proxy server” and “proxy IP address” interchangeably, but these are two different yet related things. A proxy IP address is an IP address a web server receives in place of yours. A proxy server is the actual computer where the proxy provider stores multiple proxy IP addresses and through which your web request passes on its way to the target server.

There are various types of proxies available. Yet, we will focus on a specific type of proxy: business residential proxy services.

How do business residential proxy services work?

If your company does not currently use proxies to access the internet, when you (or anyone who works for you or uses your network) visits a web page, your device transmits information about you to the servers where that web page is located. Doing so can provide those servers with a wealth of information about your connection, including your IP address and geolocation. It can also (at times) provide information from your browser, such as your settings, preferences, and stored cookies.

A business residential proxy service reroutes your web request through the proxy itself to make your web traffic look like it is coming from an IP address owned by a residential internet service provider (ISP). This not only protects your privacy, personal information, and actual IP address but it also makes your web traffic appear more legitimate and less “bot-like.”

The process a business residential proxy service uses to do this is simple:

1. The residential proxy routes your web request through an intermediary server.
2. The intermediary server assigns a residential IP address to your web request before transmitting it to the requested web page.
3. The web page receives the new IP address instead of your actual IP address, thus masking your information and making your traffic appear to come from a typical residential internet user.

Advantages of Using Business Residential Proxy Services

Before we get into some use case examples for using business residential proxy services, we should discuss why many businesses opt to do so. The main reason is to mask their IP addresses, which has several advantages in and of itself. In fact, there are a great number of benefits of using business residential proxy services to access the internet.

Proxies can improve your website’s security

Unfortunately, security threats abound on the internet. Websites themselves are not immune to these threats, which can include malware, viruses, and attacks by cybercriminals and other bad actors. You can use business residential proxy services to help protect your website from these threats.

By routing online traffic through the proxy server, you are providing your website with an extra layer of security between your server and the users who attempt to access it. This is arguably one of the main advantages of using business residential proxy services.

Proxies can help you save money on web hosting costs

By using business residential proxy services, you can route your online traffic through a single residential IP address. This can eliminate the need to buy multiple IP addresses, especially if you have multiple websites that are hosted on different servers. Using a residential proxy can allow you to pay for fewer IP addresses, which saves your company a significant amount of money on web hosting costs.

Proxies can help boost your website’s performance

Another benefit to using proxies is that routing web traffic through a proxy can reduce some of the strain of heavy traffic on your website. By offloading some of your site’s traffic, a proxy can improve the performance of your website.

Proxies can also increase your website’s performance in other ways. For example, a proxy can improve the time it takes to load web pages that contain a large number of images or other static content by caching that static content, compressing data, and balancing load between servers.

What does all of this mean? Compressing data means reducing the amount of information that needs to be transferred between the user and your server, indicating that your website will perform more efficiently for the user. Load balancing, which is a method of equally distributing traffic on your network across a pool of resources or among several servers, gives your website the ability to receive and handle larger amounts of web traffic without experiencing the slowdowns or outages that often result from increased traffic.

Proxies allow you to access blocked websites

Using business residential proxy services can help you gain access to websites that block certain connections, especially those based on geolocation or IP address.

Some websites contain content that only users in certain geographical locations can access. Because residential proxies can make your web request appear to come from anywhere in the world — down to the country, state, or city level — using these proxies can allow you to circumvent geographical restrictions and gain access to the restricted content.

Another method some web servers use to restrict content is based on the IP address attached to the user. For example, to reduce traffic from bots, many web pages restrict or block all traffic from IP addresses that appear to be attached to data centers, even if the users are legitimate and have no ill intent. By making your request appear to come from a typical residential user, a proxy can help you get around blocks based on your true IP address.

Proxies can help improve your internet connection speed

As the adage goes, “Time is money.” When your business relies on the internet, this expression can translate quite literally. A slow internet connection can be a significant barrier to optimal productivity. The longer it takes to access the web pages and information you need, the less work you can get done within an allotted time frame. And typically, the less work you can get done, the less profit your company can earn.

Business residential proxy services, especially rotating proxies, can provide your company with the reliability and speed necessary to stay productive and profitable.

Proxies help to protect your online privacy

Many people around the world use proxies as part of their online protection or network security strategy. Using your true IP address can leave you vulnerable to various types of cyber attacks, such as IP hacking. With just your IP address, scammers can learn more information about you, including your physical location, or even pretend to be you.

If a cybercriminal uses your IP address to impersonate you and commits a cybercrime, law enforcement can trace that activity back to you. Even worse, you may never know if your IP address is compromised; someone could be using your IP address to track your location or collect details about you without your knowledge.

The use of business residential proxy services not only changes the IP address transmitted to the websites your visit, but it also encrypts your transmitted data, which makes it more difficult for third parties and bad actors to access your information, monitor your online activities, or use your IP address to commit various cyber crimes.

What Can My Company Accomplish by Using Business Residential Proxy Services?

When it comes to business, what are residential proxies used for? There are countless ways your company could use business residential proxy services. Below are multiple possible use cases.

Monitoring market prices

The business landscape has always been a highly competitive, “dog-eat-dog” world, but it has never been more so than it is in the digital age. To maintain a competitive edge in such a cutthroat environment, your company needs to stay on top of the going rate for the products and services you offer your customers.

Underpricing your offerings will cut into your company’s profit margin and possibly make potential customers question the quality of your products and services. Yet, overpricing can drive your potential customers right into the proverbial arms of your competitors who offer lower prices.

Optimizing internet marketing and advertising

Online marketing is largely a game of trial and error. With all of the personalization options available to online advertisers, ads can appear differently for certain users than they do for others. If you use geographical location to direct your advertising campaigns — offering certain deals depending on where the customer lives or shops — residential proxies are a must when testing your ad campaigns to ensure you get the most out of your advertising efforts.

By changing your IP address to make your web traffic appear to come from different locations, business residential proxy services allow you to see how your ads appear to internet users located in various regions. Doing this will help you alter your ads to ensure they appear the way you want them to no matter who looks at them or from where.

Proxies can also help you gauge how well your local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are working. Because search engines are notorious for constantly updating their algorithms to repel activity from bots, it can be a challenge to collect meaningful data from your searches.

Using proxies, you can send multiple search requests (that appear to the search engine as residential searches) from anywhere around the globe. Search engines are much less likely to block search requests from real people, which means that by using business residential proxy services, you are much more likely to be able to gather the information you need from search engines.

Administering surveys

Online surveys are a fast and effective method of collecting information from a large number of people. However, to make the most of this tried and true method of data collection, business residential proxy services are a necessity.

Many paid survey websites restrict use by people who are located in certain countries or other geographical areas. Using a residential proxy for survey administration can help you get past these restrictions based on geolocation.

Performing ad verification

Using business residential proxy services can enable you to identify suspicious and potentially fraudulent advertisements that appear on your web page by tracking online ads from multiple locations and detecting suspicious network traffic patterns. Because residential proxies have such a high level of authenticity and trust, using them for ad verification can give you the power to protect your business from those with nefarious intent.

Testing software and monitoring performance

Another important use for business residential proxy services is for software developers to test new features for their websites and mobile apps. Proxies can allow you to test the functionality of your software for users in various geographical locations and determine how quickly users from different countries and areas can access your web pages. You can also send multiple requests at once by deploying several residential IP addresses, which gives you the added advantage of testing your software’s behavior and performance in the event of a high traffic load.

By using residential proxies, you can avoid outsourcing the testing of your software’s performance and speed to users in other countries.

Web scraping applications

In the age of big data, many companies use web scraping to collect large amounts of information from public sources online. Web scraping is a legitimate and common practice that allows you to gather massive amounts of data (both historical and in real-time) without the need to visit each website and manually copy and paste each piece of information. Instead, your web scraper can collect the data you desire based on the instructions you give the program. It will even save the data in a readable file neatly formatted so you can effectively read and analyze the data.

Some examples of possible web scraping applications include:

• Gathering information about pricing and products
• Market research
• Generating leads
• Analyzing your competitors
• Brand monitoring
• Investing and financing
• Collecting competitive intelligence

When you use residential proxies as part of your web scraping process, target websites are far less likely to flag your web scraping activity as suspicious or bot-like. This means that you are far less likely to be banned or blocked from accessing that website.

By using rotating residential proxies — even if you are banned — you can simply access the target web pages from a new IP address. For these reasons alone, the use of business residential proxy services is a necessity when you are attempting to perform web scraping queries.

Brand protection

Counterfeit products are the bane of many companies’ existence. Using business residential proxy services gives you the tools you need to detect and locate counterfeit sellers.

These criminals often restrict access to their websites from anyone who is located in the country where the original manufacturers of the products are based. By using residential proxies, you can get around those geolocation bans so you can gather the information about the counterfeiters you need to take the necessary legal action to stop them.

Aggregating content

Many businesses have built their platforms by aggregating data from various sources and displaying it all in one place on their websites. These companies must create and maintain databases of this aggregated content — and this is where business residential proxy services come in.

By programming a bot to visit each of the source pages regularly, refresh them, and collect the most current data, you can use residential proxies to make your online activity appear more human-like. This avoids the possibility of your business experiencing an IP address ban when the target server flags your activity as suspicious.

Can You Use Residential Proxies Anywhere?

By using business residential proxy services, you can make your online activity, traffic, and data requests appear to originate from almost any location. Rayobyte offers a network of millions of residential proxies that belong to real residential internet users from over 130 locations around the globe.

You can use a residential proxy from India, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Thailand, or a variety of other countries and even specific cities within those nations. Our list of available countries and cities is continually growing as we work to offer your company the best value and the most widespread residential proxy network we possibly can.

Do Some Providers Offer a Residential Proxy Free Trial?

Because of their increased reliability, better performance, and improved IP masking, it is not easy to gain access to residential proxies cheaply. Business residential proxy services often come with a significantly higher price tag when compared to other proxy options, such as data center proxies. However, most residential proxy users will find that the payoff is worth the additional cost.

At Rayobyte, we offer a variety of pricing tiers for our residential proxies. Our tier prices start at $15 per gigabyte (GB) for a bandwidth of up to 15 GB. Yet, the more bandwidth you buy, the lower the price per GB.

We price our Enterprise package at $3 per GB for up to 4.9 terabytes (TB). Plus, with our custom tier, we offer unlimited bandwidth residential proxies for a cost of $1 per GB.

We also offer a free residential proxy trial if you are looking to try out our business residential proxy services.

Let Residential Proxies Work For Your Business

Proxies are a highly useful tool that you can use to help your company improve its online security, privacy, and anonymity, increase your efficiency, and save both time and money. The ability to make your web requests appear to originate from local, residential IP addresses linked to real internet users can be invaluable; it ensures your website activity is not flagged, restricted, or banned from the very websites you need access to.

Thus, by understanding how business residential proxy services work, you can avail your company of the many benefits of residential proxies.

Contact Rayobyte today to learn more about how our business residential proxy services can help your company gain a competitive edge, maintain optimal network security, and much more.

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