Internet users are today more sensitized about digital anonymity and data privacy than ever before. Businesses are equally involved in the use of proxies mainly to overcome website restrictions as they are involved in data mining and market research.
You can also use proxies to protect your business websites from cookies from sites that you browse using your business computer. This has resulted in increased demand for proxies and similar software.
In response to this demand, there are now lots of companies offering proxy services. Many are great but there is also a significant number offering poor or mediocre services. You, therefore, need to conduct due diligence before choosing your proxy provider.
To start you off, we discuss the most efficient and popular residential proxies. First, we mention why the article focuses on residential proxies.
Why residential proxies
Proxies are intermediary servers that link your browser to the sites you wish to visit without revealing your IP address. The proxy presents its own IP to conceal your IP address. This allows you to visit sites that you would otherwise not be able to access for whatever reasons.
IP addresses for residential proxies are provided by internet service providers to their customers. The residential proxies can, therefore, be traced to devices, either handsets or computers, in real physical location.
As a result, websites that would block datacenter proxies would allow residential proxies because they recognize them as real IPs.
Residential proxies are therefore relatively better for your business because they are more reliable, can access virtually all websites and offer greater anonymity.
In no particular order, here are the six most popular residential proxy service providers in the world right now:
Oxylabs
Oxylabs offer over 30 million proxy IPs from dozens of countries. Though they major in residential proxies, they also have millions of datacenter proxies in their portfolio.
Oxylabs’ proxies have been designed and programmed for heavy data mining through web crawling and data scraping.
The support team will help you choose the best proxy that suits your business’s needs. The team is also available to give you the guidance you may need throughout the period that you will be using the Oxylabs proxies.
Check their site for reliable residential proxies and other services or products that you may need.
Smartproxy
With over 10 million proxies from almost 200 locations, Smartproxy offers some of the most reliable proxy services in the world. The proxies are mostly rotating residential proxies which are generally undetectable by most website security systems.
They have a range of products that serve various types of customers from newbies to pros. Also whether you want customized products or the cheaper ready-to-use products Smartproxy has got your back.
Just like Oxylabs, Smartproxy also has a very responsive support team to walk you through the use of their products for maximum benefits.
Luminati
Luminati is one of the most popular proxy service providers in the world. They have over 40 million individual residential proxies from almost every major city and town in the world.
They boast of having a significant number of Fortune 500 companies as their clients. This is because their proxies have proven to be reliable for online data scraping which is common among these levels of companies.
Luminati’s rotating residential proxies are also among the fastest and most efficient in the world. The site details the other products that are offered at Luminati.
Geosurf
Geosurf has just over 2 million residential proxy IPs but they are evenly spread in the world’s major cities to offer you adequate coverage geographically. Their proxies are most ideal for scraping and web scraping thus popular among data miners.
This is in line with the founders’ data mining professional background. Geosurf proxies are also known for being easy to understand and use making them appropriate for beginners.
Microleaves
Microleaves have one of the highest number of residential proxies in the world. At any moment, they have around 26 million IPS that allow rotation every 5 minutes.
This high frequency of rotation makes them best suited for web crawling into websites with high-security systems. These services, however, are quite expensive especially if you want US residential IPs.
Netnut
Netnut boasts of a technological system that makes their residential proxies the fastest residential proxies. They achieve this by routing the IP traffic through the internet service providers themselves.
For context, the traffic for residential proxies is generally routed through the real physical devices using the proxy IP. Independent labs indicate that it’s hard to conclusively prove that Netnuts proxies are the fastest.
Conclusion
Different proxies are ideal for different purposes. As such, before choosing a proxy provider, you need to first consider the type of proxies that they offer and the websites you want to access using the proxies.
It is also prudent to check other customers’ reviews especially with regard to customer support services. You want to choose a provider that is responsive to customer queries.
