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Why You Should Never Use a Free Private Proxy

    • 3280 posts
    July 17, 2023 3:03 AM EDT

    Why You Should Never Use a Free Private Proxy
    A free dedicated proxy is, first of all, a scam. Not many things in life are actually free and when it comes to free online services, somebody somewhere is most likely making money from your data. Anyone who falls for a free dedicated proxy risks:To get more news about proxy server list, you can visit pyproxy.com official website.

    Their private information getting leaked (think credit card info, passwords and other crucial data). Target websites getting injected with malicious ads (read more about it in our “free proxies are bad” blog post). Being redirected to a website full of ads, so someone could make some money from you. Not the most dangerous scenario, but it can get super annoying (just imagine copping sneakers with such proxies).
    There’s another important point to make. If your dedicated proxy is supposedly free – you probably got it from one of the free proxy lists. And, well, that makes it a shared proxy because it’s nearly impossible that you will be the only one using it.

    How to Choose the Best Private Proxy Provider
    Research all of them. Analyze their websites, see how they position themselves. Usually, there are two ways of presentation:

    Proxies for business. Proxy providers for business will usually state their use cases as market research, SEO, brand protection, price monitoring, e-commerce, and so on. Proxies for personal use. Proxy providers for personal use will usually talk about geo-blocks, website unblocking, sneaker copping (which is a business, but somehow it usually goes along with personal use), Pokemon Go, Netflix, Craigslist proxies, and so on.
    1. Bright Data

    Bright Data mainly targets businesses. It has a large collection of private IPs throughout 3,000+ subnets. You can control the proxies using robust management tools: an API and Bright Data’s proxy manager. The latter lets you rotate and otherwise manipulate the addresses. There’s also a feature for 100% uptime, which replaces an IP with a similar one if it fails. The provider has impeccable download speed, so a good choice for traffic-intensive tasks.

    While Bright Data doesn’t require buying many proxies, it makes financial sense to do so. The pricing is further complicated by all the upsells which other providers offer free of charge. Enabling features like city targeting, multiple domains, and even unlimited traffic palpably adds to the price.
    2. Oxylabs

    Oxylabs has the vastest network of private datacenter proxies on the market. With over 2 million IPs, it can sustain even the largest web scraping operations. While there’s no self-service, the provider hand-picks proxies for you and even lets you choose as many subnets as you need. In addition, Oxylabs offers a powerful API, an optional add-on that rotates the proxies, and a team of web scraping experts to help you.
    3. Rayobyte

    Rayobyte is a well-known datacenter proxy provider. It controls over 300,000 proxies, many of which are hosted on in-house infrastructure. Rayobyte’s system automatically issues IPs to optimize them for diversity. If you’re unhappy with what you get, the provider lets you adjust the addresses until they work as needed. You can otherwise accomplish most tasks yourself using the provided dashboard.

    Rayobyte supports fewer locations than Oxylabs or Bright Data, but its plans suit all kinds of users. They’re very broad, though: both 100 and 950 proxies will cost the same per IP address. So, the price can range from decent to expensive, depending where on the range you end up.
    4. Webshare

    Webshare runs dedicated proxies in 30 countries around the world. These addresses aren’t pool-based, but you can specify how many IPs you want from each location, and rotate your proxies by generating an endpoint via a dashboard. Otherwise, you can refresh your proxies anywhere between several minutes and a month at an additional charge. For example, you can buy 20 IPs and replace them every 10 minutes. This way, you’ll get to use a larger pool. The dashboard is easy-to-use and navigate, so it’s a good choice for first-time users.
    5. IPRoyal

    IPRoyal offers cheap datacenter proxies from over 30 countries. The service comes with an API and a proxy manager, and you can refresh your proxies once per month free of charge. However, there’s no option to rotate your proxies. IPRoyal’s country targeting is rather limited – you get one country per plan. Additionally, the provider doesn’t give access to the whole IP pool.