Unless you are new to the internet, you must have heard of the term ‘proxy.’ These tools are designed to hide your IP address and keep your sensitive data protected online. They provide tons of benefits and have become extremely popular in recent years as digitization penetrates every aspect of modern society.
As the need for proxies continues to rise, so does the number of companies offering the service. Truth to the matter, if you perform a simple Google search right now, you will find hundreds of proxy service providers. What’s more, if you wait a while and perform the exact search again, you will find even more. Some of these providers last for a couple of days, while some are years or even decades old and continue serving clients worldwide.
The numerous proxy providers on the market have advantages as well as disadvantages. For starters, it means you have a large pool of companies to choose from. However, you need to be particularly careful here, as a simple mishap might result in an unreliable provider that will offer sub-par services and even go as far as compromising your data.
Selecting a Proxy Company for Your Needs
You need to follow a perfectly laid out procedure before selecting a proxy service provider to cover your needs. Accordingly, there are several factors you need to check, and only when you are sure that the provider checks all the boxes should you go on ahead and start working with them.
With this information in mind, below are some of the steps you need to follow when selecting a reputable proxy service provider for your needs.
Find Out What Type of Proxy You Need
This is arguably the most important thing you need to do when searching for a proxy provider. You should look at your business or individual needs and determine what type of proxy will meet your demands.
It would be best to start by checking the different types of proxies on the web and their features. You may opt for free or paid proxies, depending on your needs. If you settle on the former, here’s the best free proxy list out there. Once you find a proxy that resonates with your current demands, you should list the providers that offer such services.
Check For Proxy Pool Size
Some users argue that proxy pool size does not matter as it is just a marketing technique that companies use. The number of available IP addresses does, in fact, count to the reliability of the proxy service rendered. Some proxy companies offer between thousands to millions and tens of millions of datacenter or residential proxies.
In such a scenario, the bigger the network, the bigger the subnet size, which translates to better load balancing on the user’s part. Therefore, you should always check for proxy network size and verify before selecting the ideal provider, as this will influence service delivery in the long run.
Check for Proxy Performance
Not all proxy providers perform the same. Hence, before selecting your ideal company, you should use a proxy checker tool to see how it fairs compared to its competitors. A proxy checker is designed to verify a proxy’s performance metrics.
While basic proxy checkers will check for the availability of the proxy, more advanced ones can check thousands of proxies in a single instance and return results straight away with various properties such as speed and accessibility. You can use the proxy checker on this website to check for a proxy’s performance.
Conclusion
It is no secret that the proxy market is flooded with hundreds of companies, all looking to offer their services to you, the end-user. Therefore, before committing yourself to any provider, you need to check and ensure that they meet your demands.
The list above contains the three most important strategies you should use to find the ideal provider. However, you should note that there are other metrics you should use, such as the provider’s ethics, customer service, and overall availability. Only when you have all these factors in check should you commit to a provider. Finally, you should perform this process from time to time to ensure that the provider maintains top-notch service delivery.