7 Top Proxy Questions for Your Provider: Your Ultimate Guide

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03.10.2022 in Residential Proxies by Chris Collins

Do you need to acquire a reliable set of proxy server solutions for business purposes? Or have you already signed up with a proxy service provider and would like to have more options available?

How do you know you’re using the best proxies in the market for your business goals when there are so many companies out there?

Are you checking the online reviews, the services, the prices, or the industry reputation? Do you actually need for your business all the services a reputable proxy service provider can deliver?

Before finding the correct answers to these questions, you should always take into consideration the exact reasons for acquiring proxies:

  • Do you need proxies to create multiple social media accounts?
  • Do you need to verify ads or monitor price changes on your competitors’ websites?
  • Do you need to extract information for marketing and/or sales purposes?
  • Are we talking about a one-time job or a recurring data extraction activity that takes place on a regular basis?

No matter if you are a company that just started using proxies or you’ve already been using proxy solutions for your business campaigns, there are several popular questions you should ask your provider before signing up with the company of your choice.

If your proxy provider is able to respond to the following questions, you may be on the right track to a successful online scraping session.

7 Questions For Your Proxy Server Solutions Provider

1. What kind of proxies do you provide?

To have an answer to this question, you should be aware of the exact reasons you need to use proxy server solutions. If you are aware that you need proxies for a specific purpose, then you might have an easier life in choosing the right company for your business needs.

At the same time, the proxy server provider you choose should be an established company that is able to deliver both residential and datacenter proxies which can help you obtain content from online sources.

Most of the time, users that are involved in data scraping activities usually start by testing a set of data center proxies for their extraction jobs. If the datacenter proxies prove to be useful enough - especially when they are easier to acquire and come at a lower price - the user continues to utilize them.

However, if your business success depends on the power of proxies and you need web data for various activities - price comparison overviews, market research, SEO purposes, sales intelligence, travel aggregation, and other high demanding business activities - then you should move your attention towards residential proxies and make sure that your proxy service provider is a reliable company in the market.

When dealing with difficult scraping jobs where the best data sources are protected by advanced protection mechanisms, the only reliable way to get access to the content you need is by using residential proxy server solutions that are able to bypass restrictions and protect your real IP address.

So, ask your proxy provider what kind of proxies they provide so that you may make the right decision.

2. What are the main benefits if I choose your backconnect residential proxies?

If you are involved in demanding data scraping operations and you require the latest updated information that may prove useful for your business, then you surely need the power of backconnect residential proxies.

Backconnect residential proxies are some of the most popular proxy server solutions in the industry as they connect to a pool of proxies to obtain a new residential IP at every rotation time. For this reason, backconnect proxies are also known as rotating proxies.

Your proxy service provider should be able to offer you these residential proxy solutions for high-demand scraping jobs, where fast access and an increased level of privacy become essential.

So, ask your proxy provider about residential proxies and learn more about their true potential so that you may better understand how to open the right doors in the online environment.

What you have to remember is that backconnect residential proxies allow you to rotate the residential IP addresses at the moment you want and can be very useful for difficult web scraping activities.

To sum it up, with backconnect residential proxies you can:

  • connect from any place in the world;
  • remain completely anonymous;
  • browse online without raising any red flags;
  • access online sites without issues.

3. What are the main benefits if I choose your datacenter proxies?

For users who engage in data scraping jobs that do not demand large resources, datacenter proxies might be more than enough.

Since these proxies are not related to Internet Service Providers but come from data centers in various areas of the world, they might appear less reliable than residential proxies.

However, if you are a user who wants to go online for personal reasons to engage in data extraction jobs on an irregular basis, these types of proxies could provide some satisfactory results.

Furthermore, datacenter proxies are easy to acquire in the online space and they can be secured at lower prices, which makes them more than attractive for many users scraping for online information.

In addition, datacenter proxies are very much appreciated by users that look for superior speeds. Since these IPs are actually virtual IP addresses that come from data centers and not from real users (who receive their IPs from ISPs), these proxies are not so much dependent on the local networks from a particular country.

So, if you consider that datacenter proxies might do the job for you, just ask your proxy provider how good their virtual IPs are and in what countries their data centers are located. Obviously, you would be interested to use IPs from data centers in countries recognized for the overall good speed of the Internet.

4. Can I set the location and rotation of the proxies?

This is an important question you need to raise with your proxy provider if you want to make sure that you can access local content while rotating the exit IP address at a predetermined time to avoid getting blocked.

But why would you want to use this type of proxy server solution?

First of all, when we refer to setting the location and rotation of the proxies, we are actually talking about backconnect residential proxies.

These proxies are recognized for their ability to access challenging sites since they allow the user to choose a residential IP from a specific country and change on a regular basis the exit IP in order to preserve the privacy of the original IP address.

From a general point of view, backconnect residential proxies - which are also known as rotating residential proxies - have always been preferred for demanding data extraction jobs where the user really needs to obtain valuable information for important business goals. 

We are talking here about a diversified number of activities that include online scraping, ads verification, price monitoring, online marketing, sales intelligence, social media, SEO, etc.

So, if you want to choose the location of your residential proxies and to possess the ability to change your exit IPs on a regular basis, ask your proxy provider if they are able to deliver backconnect or rotating residential proxies for you.

5. Securing valuable data is vital for my success. How good are your proxies for me?

If your business depends on proxies and their ability to open doors in the virtual space, this becomes a vital question you should raise with your proxy provider.

Your provider should be able to offer all the necessary details so that you may be able to appreciate the quality of the proxies and understand how valuable they can be for your business.

Since you are interested in securing valuable data from the Internet, you should be looking to obtain access to the right tools that can prove useful for resource-demanding content extraction jobs.

Further on, if your business goals are dependent on this important type of information from online sources, you should be ready to acquire the best proxy solutions for data scraping activities. We are again talking about backconnect or rotating residential proxies.

With the right residential proxies at your disposal, you have the guarantee that you get access every time to the content you target and you won’t be blocked from obtaining the necessary data.

But easy access is nothing without a good level of privacy and anonymity. The proxies delivered by your provider should be able to keep your genuine IP address hidden while you go online on various websites.

Finally, you have to remember that a great number of websites are now protected by various anti-scraping mechanisms that keep unwanted visitors out and even deliver a wrong set of data to those looking to scrape for information.

So, take all these details into account and contact your proxy provider to let them know your business needs and requirements. An experienced proxy provider should be able to recognize these challenges and offer the right proxy server solutions.

6. What are the most popular use cases for your proxies?

How do you know that your proxy provider’s solutions are right for your company unless you discover the most popular use cases for their usage?

As we tried to emphasize in our introduction, the first step you need to take before choosing a provider is to actually understand what your business needs are and to recognize the actual use cases for proxy server solutions.

Once you discover the main use cases of your provider’s products, you should be able to acknowledge if you actually found the right proxy business that can respond to your company’s needs.

From a wider perspective, a serious proxy provider should be able to offer customers the right set of products that can be used in a large variety of use cases from online marketing campaigns and market price overviews to SEO, social media, and ads verification.

For instance, if you are involved in demanding data extraction activities, and regularly target websites that are difficult to scrape information from, you should direct your attention toward well-established companies from the proxy space that proved their worth over the years via time-tested products and highly reliable solutions.

Thus, if you are interested in obtaining detailed information from the Internet for sales intelligence and marketing purposes or other relevant activities, you should make sure that your proxy provider can deliver the solutions you need for your business goals.

7. My company is involved in web data scraping activities. What are the best proxies for me?

If your company is involved in web data scraping activities, then you need the best proxies in the market, proxies that get the job done.

Now, it is equally important to determine the difficulty of the scraping jobs you need to undertake, which in turn depends on the importance of the content you need to acquire for your business.

So, when asking your proxy provider for the right proxy tools, you are the one who needs to identify the exact data scraping projects that are of interest to you. 

Are you targeting content for SEO or online shopping purposes? Are you looking to attract valuable information for sales intelligence or market analysis?

The success of your scraping activity is very much connected to the quality of your proxy tools. With so many solutions in the market, especially when talking about difficult data extraction jobs, you should look for proxies that offer accuracy, stable connections, and a positive outcome.

So, if you’re dealing with difficult scraping jobs, you would naturally be interested to acquire a set of residential proxy solutions that deliver the most reliable results in the market.

If you are engaged in data scraping jobs where the best results are expected, ask your provider to offer you the best solutions in the market. With residential proxies at work, you should have no issue in targeting geo-restricted sites while keeping your real IP address hidden.

Your proxies are as reliable as your proxy provider

We understand there are numerous providers in the industry, so customers who want to find the best business partner for proxy-related services may have a hard time finding one.

However, if the selected proxy company is able to respond to the most popular questions we provided in our article, you may be on the right track to success.

But answering the questions is not enough.

Before signing up with a proxy provider (or continuing the collaboration), you need to make sure that the selected company brings the necessary experience and that its products have already been tested in data extraction sessions that included some of the most popular use cases.

Furthermore, though most proxy server companies may advertise their advanced technology, you need to verify that their proxies can actually allow you to engage in data extraction activities without getting blocked or receiving a false set of data.

Though you may think that access to data is the most important part of the story, you may be surprised to find out that privacy is equally valuable.

Users need not only easy access to information but they must keep their private details hidden by making sure they obtain the requested information while keeping their genuine IP addresses undisclosed. You sure wouldn’t want your competition to find out that you’ve been visiting them recently, right?

In the end, you have to remember that the proxy service provider you choose should become your business partner, especially if you are a new company just starting out.

Positive development takes time, money, and valuable data for business purposes. If you have to find the time and financial resources, valuable content should be delivered by a reliable business partner that can provide the right proxy server solutions.

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