What are the best proxies and what should you look for when choosing a proxy provider?
The answer depends on what you use proxies for. So, let’s go through some major proxy
use cases and find out which proxies would work best for you. We’ll be covering the
best and worst providers overall as well, so stick till the end!
If you’re managing multiple social media accounts, without proxies you’re going to
get shut down really fast. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter are very
experienced in preventing automated activity.
But if you use rotating proxies, you’re not going to get far. So, the most important
thing for you is the ability to hold sticky sessions.
Use residential or mobile proxies. Both borrow IPs from real users and make it very hard
for Instagram and others to block them. Mobile proxies are the best option, but they might
be very expensive. Private datacenter proxies can still work for some tasks, like scraping
social media, though we wouldn’t recommend them.
Some great providers for social media management are:
Smartproxy
Geosurf
Luminati used to be another great choice, but we’ve heard they’re no longer keen
on renting proxies for social media use.
If you’re looking for proxies for retail or more specifically – sneakers, then you’ll
need residential IPs.
Datacenter proxies used to be a good choice for sneaker copping. Not anymore. Many of
the shoe sites have implemented strict security measures. So, the best choice are residential
proxies or static residential proxies.
Most sneaker sites today are using queue-based systems. So, it’s important to get proxies
that can hold the same IP. You should be looking at 10 minutes at least.
You’ll need your selected proxies to be near the store’s server. For example, if
the seller is located in the US, you’ll need proxies from the States – ideally NY,
Virginia, or Chicago. This will make your connection faster.
Speed is crucial for Supreme, where drops last a few seconds. It’s less important
for queue-based sites, but having fast proxies won’t hurt.
After extensive testing, our favorite sneaker proxy providers are:
Smartproxy
Oxylabs
Netnut
There are plenty of other, specialized sneaker proxy providers out there. But most of them
resell one of those three at a markup. So, why not go straight to the source?
Proxies for web scraping and SEO purposes have to overcome Captchas and
Google blocks.
This means you need to have a large pool of unabused IP addresses.
They need to hide your IP and not give away that you're using a proxy to scrape data.
So, the proxy provider needs to have Anonymous proxies, ideally residential IPs. Datacenter
proxies can be okay for smaller websites or if you really know what you’re doing.
Next, you might need to scrape local data. If so, choose a proxy provider that lets target
local proxies and access data in numerous countries or cities.
To scrape fast, you need to do many tasks at once. The provider should ideally offer
unlimited connections.
You don’t really need SOCKS proxies for scraping Google. So, save yourself the cost
and possible compatibility errors, and go with HTTP(S).
The proxy server should be stable, sufficiently fast, and have good success rates. We understand
that it’s hard to measure performance by yourself, so we’ve made the tests for you.
You can find them using the link in the description box below.
Honourable mentions for web scraping and SEO proxy providers would be:
Oxylabs
Crawlera
Luminati
Before we move to the worst and best proxies overall, I have a question for you: Have you
already tried using proxies? Which provider did you try? Write a comment!
Are there any proxies that don’t suit anyone or anything? Definitely. That’s free proxies.
Anything labelled “free” is often a trap – someone is getting something out of it.
Most probably it will be at your expense – your information might leak, you can get malicious
ads, or worst of all, your personal details might get stolen.
Over the years, we’ve tried many proxy providers. Most were good at certain tasks and weak at
others. But some have shown continuous excellence, no matter what we’ve thrown at them. They
consistently dominate our top proxy lists.
The first place goes to Oxylabs – a premium proxy provider with reliable proxies and great
customer service. It’s the best option for large-scale scraping.
The second best option is Smartproxy – it offers basically the same quality services
like Oxylabs, but for hustlers and smaller businesses.
And the third major proxy provider is Luminati. It has a wide variety of features and powerful
proxy management tools for most business use cases.
In this video, you’ve probably heard the terms residential and datacenter proxies quite
a few times. If they’re not familiar to you, don’t worry – we’re going to cover
them in our next video. So don’t forget to subscribe and click the bell so that you
wouldn’t miss it. Meanwhile, you can learn more about proxies by watching this video
on our channel or by visiting Proxyway.com. See you there!