Proxy servers are used to mask your IP address to maintain privacy while browsing the internet. But the use of proxies isn’t limited to that. From web scraping to monitoring ads or SEO, proxies are highly useful in many cases. But not all types of proxies can do that.
A residential proxy is more potent than other types of proxies in web scraping, especially Instagram scraping. Websites don’t usually detect residential proxies as proxies, so you can efficiently perform various operations without getting your IP address banned. Let’s learn more about residential proxies and their use cases.
What Is a Proxy?
As you might already know, your device has an IP address when you connect it to the internet. It is more like your house address, which is used to determine your physical location. But what if you don’t want others to figure out your IP address?
In that case, you use proxy servers. These servers have their own IP addresses and respective locations. So, your connection request goes through the proxy server, and it masks your address with a new IP. And your IP address is no longer visible to anyone so that you can maintain privacy.
What Are Residential Proxies?
As we have already stated, anonymity isn’t the only thing we use proxies for. Collecting enormous amounts of data from the web is a big part of proxy use cases. But various websites set up guards to prevent us from collecting data. These guards can detect data center proxies and ban them in batches.
Residential proxies are simply IP addresses of other users like you. They agree to share their IP addresses with other users on the internet. So, when you use residential proxies, it looks like you are a real user trying to collect some information. And most web servers can’t usually detect residential proxies. So, they let you in without any problems.
Use Cases of Residential Proxies
Though residential proxy is used in many cases, we have compiled the most common cases for your convenience. Take a look.
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Accessing Location-Restricted Content
When you want to watch some content that is for specific regions, you can use residential proxies to bypass that restriction. Residential proxies offer numerous locations worldwide, so you can pretend to be anywhere you want or need. For example, if a BBC show is limited to UK viewers only, you can use residential proxies to select a UK location and watch the content easily.
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Managing Multiple Accounts
Creating or managing multiple accounts on social media or e-commerce platforms is somewhat required for many businesses and individuals. But they need to use proxies to manage those accounts. And residential proxies are the best for this because they provide complete anonymity. Plus, proxy detectors used by social media platforms can’t detect these addresses as proxies.
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Web Scraping
Collecting vast information from the web is a popular use case of residential proxies. Readymade or custom scraping tools are used to collect publicly available data from websites. But these websites can detect data center IPs and block requests. The websites don’t detect residential proxies, so you can easily scrape the necessary data from the web.
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Instagram Scraping
This has lately been very popular as Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms for sharing various information.
When you use residential proxies to scrape this kind of data, the server rotates your IP address every few minutes. As a result, the platform can’t detect that a single user is making so many requests. So, residential proxies are a must for Instagram scraping. You can follow the guide in the link above to learn more about Instagram scraping.
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Ad Verification
When businesses run ads, they need to check whether the ad appears as desired. So, they use residential proxies to get access to various locations across the world and check the ads. As there are more locations available here, the task becomes easier.
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SEO Monitoring
Ranking higher on search results is the main target of SEO. When you work with massive search engines, you need to scrape a lot of data to monitor SEO trends, research keywords, and many more. Residential proxies are the best answer to this problem, as you can easily monitor SEO with these proxies.
Conclusion
Residential proxies are super helpful whether you want to scrape data or maintain anonymity. They play a significant role in social media scraping, especially Instagram scraping, to let you collect vast amounts of information without getting banned. They are also beneficial for managing multiple accounts or accessing location-restricted content. Check the link to learn how to scrape Instagram step by step.