Perhaps you have heard of the word “proxies” before now. However, what you may not be familiar with is the different types out there and their specific uses.
There are different types of proxies, but here we will focus on data center proxies and you will find answers to the question: “What is a data center proxy?” In this article, expect a short rundown on the essential characteristics of this type of proxy.
What are Data Center Proxies?
Data center proxies are proxies with no affiliation with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). They originate from a secondary corporation, providing you with private IP authentication as well as an increased level of anonymity.
However, you must have at the back of your mind that web servers can identify data center proxies and prevent them from gaining access to the desired source.
Some targets may flag these proxies because they have no connection with any ISP providers, which means that specific precautionary measures might be initiated against them.
Some of the features of data center proxies are:
- They can be seen as less genuine but still legitimate,
- They have great connection speed,
- They come from secondary corporations.
What are Data Center Proxies’ Benefits?
The most critical benefits of data center proxies are that they’re cheap and offer swift response time—perfect for data harvesting because of their speed.
It’s easy to acquire plenty of them because they come in affordable prices, allowing you to rotate them during web scraping.
One of the main disadvantages of data center proxies is the fact that they can be detected with ease by web servers. Requests won’t trace back to the ISP, and when the site visited inspects the requests, it becomes very apparent that someone’s hiding behind a proxy.
Many people employ proxies to carry out their nefarious activities — painting a bad picture for those who use them legitimately.
As we delve further to provide answers to “what is a data center proxy?”, let’s compare them to residential proxies.
What are Residential Proxies?
A residential proxy is an IP address given by an Internet Service Provider to homeowners. This IP is a real IP address connected to a physical location. So what it means is that whenever you move to a new location, your ISP provides you with a new IP address.
Data Center vs. Residential
It all boils down to what your needs are — high security and legitimacy, or speed and lower prices, because they both hide your IP address similarly enough.
Residential proxies are the best option because they leave no footprint. They would never trigger any security alarms. They come in handy when scraping data in large quantities.
However, data center ones fit quite well if you’re able to cover your footprint. If you have a hold on proxies — and you have the technical know-how — you’re good to go.
Data Center Proxies’ Use Cases
The use cases are endless — but the focus is on a few of them that have been explored for business.
Data center proxies are employed for brand protection as they’re cheap, fast, and reliable as web monitoring solutions.
When somebody makes use of your brand without your permission, your revenue may decline pretty quickly. More so, your brand reputation may be negatively hit. To end this, businesses would have to react as fast as they can to protect their brand and keep their market share.
Another example of use cases of a data center proxy is when you scrape the web for data. When you do so and want it to be successful, it is a must to harness a more substantial amount of proxies. Otherwise, you might experience a hitch while at it and the websites would restrict your access to them.
How Web Scraping Works
There are several reasons why businesses extract information. Some of the reasons are to grow businesses and to have an understanding of competitors’ pricing models.
Andrew Medal of Entrepreneur magazine believes web scraping is an ethical form of business growth, which has been proven to perform magically over time. Starters can set up a robot.txt file that communicates with a web crawler and tells it what to look for on a web page.
Medal’s uses an example of sneaker reseller assigning a bot to browse retail sites like StockX and eBay for “Jordan” as well as “Air Jordan.” As a result, the reseller could access the aggregated prices offered by the competitors and leverage that to their advantage.
With web scraping, you are able to gather insights and stay ahead of your competitors. You’d want to keep your web scraping program confidential—which means you’ll need a reliable proxy to mask your IP address.
Data That Can Be Extracted Using Data Center Proxies:
- Leads information on Yelp,
- Events from thousands of event websites,
- Prices of cars in different dealership platforms,
- Prices on eCommerce sites,
- Information on job boards websites,
- And so much more.
Data center proxies are perfect for gathering data and work best for brand protection as well as market research. It would be best to consult with a reliable proxy provider if you’re not sure whether this solution would work for you.
