In this pandemic and post-pandemic era, you would definitely need a datacenter proxy. Why? There could be a thousand reasons which range from data protection to market competition. Using a proxy and the type depends on the requirements and your needs. A datacenter proxy is basically a set of IP addresses that are used instead of the original IP address, helping to cope with everyday work tasks.
Datacenter proxies are usually required by companies or organizations to beat their competitors and stay updated with the new trends. Let’s take you through a step-by-step guide on how to use a datacenter proxy according to PrivateProxy and see where it can be used, including the basic types of proxies.
What is a proxy?
First, we need to cover the basics that will include what is a proxy and why to use it. A proxy can be considered as a middle-man between you and the website you need data from. Whether you want to acquire data or you want to perform extensive market research, a proxy can be used without detecting the target website and IP you are using.
Coming to the internet, people are identified through IP addresses. Using a proxy means you are using a different IP address instead of yours. Companies use datacenter proxies to get real-time data. This data could be about other companies, their competitors, or about a different product that they intend to start.
Different types of proxies?
Datacenter proxies are different from other proxies like residential proxies. Let’s check the main differences that are presented in the following points.
Source
Firstly, their source is different. ISP is used for residential proxies, while cloud service providers are the source for datacenter proxies.
Level of anonymity
It might be strange to know, but residential proxies offer a much higher anonymity since their job is to just cover one IP address. Whereas, datacenter proxies are used for companies, and they need to jump several IP addresses and a small delay can lead to detection and ultimately banning.
Price
One can either buy or rent proxies. A residential proxy is expensive considering the higher level of anonymity and a strong wall against detection as compared to a datacenter proxy.
Speed
Datacenter proxies have a higher speed of alternating between IP addresses, thereby helping you to finish your task of web scraping or data acquisition much faster as compared to residential proxies.
Where to use a datacenter proxy?
Now that you know what a datacenter proxy is and how it is different from residential proxies, it is time to know where a proxy can be used. Following are the ways to use datacenter proxy:
Data collection
The main reason companies use datacenter proxies are for data collection. Apart from product manufacturing and maintaining, a company needs proper marketing to increase their sales, thereby requiring data. It can be a study of target audience, analysis of the product among the people, researching the competitors, and trends about their product.
Also, another important set of data would be the pricing strategies. The company would require up-to-date information of what the price of the product is in the market and what kinds of shifts are taking place.
Proper advertising
The next area where a company would utilize datacenter proxies is advertising. Sending out emails, messages, and other forms of digital marketing are super important these days. Sometimes, the marketing strategies could appear annoying, leading to blockage of the IP address.
Using a proxy would prevent the blockage and the advertisement would continue to flash. Also, the firewall installed in some computers can block certain IP addresses because of spamming. In some cases, the ads appear as spamming because of the similarity with other spamming websites. Using datacenter proxies prevent firewall blockage too.
Extraction of stock market data
Stock market is another area where datacenter proxies are required. The information for the stock market is rapidly changing and in order to stay updated, proxy IP addresses will help you receive accurate and real-time data.
Apart from following the stock market and knowing the trends, if you want to scrape the stock market data, using the original one can lead to detection and a ban. However, datacenter proxies are amazing to cover the original IP address, and you can extract the data easily.
How to set up a datacenter proxy?
Now that you understand the purpose of datacenter proxies, let us go through a step-by-step guide to set up the datacenter proxies.
1. Choosing a datacenter proxy vendor
This is the most important step, where you choose the proxy vendor. You should be careful while choosing the vendor as some can provide weak proxies that will not provide enough coverage and your IP address might be caught by the target website.
Before choosing, check their reviews and ratings on the website. Also, third party reviews provide a great insight. Furthermore, choose a vendor whose practices are legit.
2. Rent or buy a number of servers
The next step is to decide whether you want to rent or buy. If you have a long-term usage, buying is a better option. The number of servers or IP addresses you want depends on how many IPs you want to offer.
Understand your needs and time-period of a web scraping project, depending on which you can decide on a number. It can vary from 10 to 10,000.
3. Set them up as proxy servers
Once you have got the proxies. You just set them as your server. The steps vary for different web browsers. For this tutorial, we are going to stick to Chrome:
- Open Customize and Control Google Chrome in the web browser.
- Then go to Settings > System > Open Proxy Settings.
- Next, you go to the internet Settings > LAN Settings and enter the proxy IP address manually.
- They will alternate with each other so that the target website cannot locate one IP address and therefore cannot stop you from data extraction.
Final thoughts
There you go, you are all set up to use your datacenter proxies. Start surfing the web and scrape data as much as you want. There are various requirements and conditions which you might want to check before you select a proxy vendor.
The market for proxy vendors is huge. Take your time and select the vendor that offers the best offer as well as a good amount of IP addresses.
