99% of the time, when someone is talking about proxies, they’re just talking about normal, regular, every-day proxy connections. There are other types of proxies, though, and it would be a fundamental mistake to think they all work the same way. It’s time for some education.

How a Normal Proxy Works

A standard proxy server is the default from which other types of proxies are derived. It’s very simple in essence, though it has a lot of different possible configuration options. VPNs are a variation that work in much the same way, for example.

A proxy is essentially just a web server that sits between you and the website you want to reach. Normally when you want to connect to a website, you send a request from your browser. This request goes out through your modem and router, to a street-level router, to a neighborhood router, to an ISP server, to an internet backbone, and then in the reverse down to the location of the server you’re connecting to. Often, website servers are located with direct connections to internet backbones, so you don’t have to worry about the neighborhood or local routers getting in the way and adding latency.

A proxy server simply sits somewhere in the middle. Usually, the physical location of the proxy is in a foreign country, so a proxy connection might jump the ocean, go to a satellite, or have some wireless transmission somewhere along the way.

A proxy server doesn’t have to be a dedicated server or piece of high powered hardware. In fact, with the right configuration, any computer can be turned into a proxy server. This further adds to the latency of a proxy server, but more on that later.

In our sample, your direct connection goes from your computer, through a bunch of routers, and into the web host server where the website resides. It gets the data you want, then returns the way it came, to give you that information. The information can be anything from the page loading to downloading a file to a web app. The variation is infinite.

With a proxy, the connection leaves your computer and goes through routers until it reaches the proxy. The proxy then strips some identifying data from your request and fills it with its own, or doesn’t. It forwards the connection along to the web server, through routers and connections once again. The web server answers the request – recording the altered data from the proxy rather than your data – and the data goes back to the proxy server. The proxy forwards the data back to you.

This by physical necessity adds latency to your connection, but the benefit you get out of it is one of privacy. By stripping referral data, websites don’t see where your connection is really coming from. There are different levels of anonymity:

• Anonymous: removes as much referral data as possible so that the web server receives no information about who you are.
• Distorting: removes some data and changes other data, so that the web server gets some information, but it may not be correct.
• Transparent: does not remove or hide your information. These proxies are often used to forward or alter data rather than connection information.

There is also Tor, the Onion Router, which is a semi-anonymous network of randomized proxies through which your connection passes before reaching its destination. There are privacy issues with Tor as well, but it’s better than a transparent proxy. Tor is also very similar to a backconnect proxy system, in many ways.

Standard proxy servers can be configured in a number of ways. They can be public, open to anyone to use, or private, restricted to people who pay for access. They can pass data through unaltered, or they can add in ads or display your content in an iframe. They can be fast or slow. They can be located in the USA, Britain, Germany, India, the Ukraine, or anywhere else in the world. They can connect using HTTP or one of the SOCKS protocols.

Proxies in general are useful for a certain minimal level of security and anonymity, but one proxy on its own is going to do very little to maintain your privacy if you’re doing something anyone wants to monitor. It might protect you from neighbor Bob’s 15 year old script kiddy nephew, but it won’t protect you from the NSA or the FBI.

Using more secure proxies is the realm of something like Tor or a backconnect proxy. These are somewhat more secure, but they’re more useful for something like bulk data scraping, not casual every day browsing.

In fact, the number one drawback with most proxies is how much slower it tends to make your connection. It doesn’t matter what proxy you’re using, what protocol it’s using, how powerful the machine is, or where it’s located; a proxy is an additional step. If you add six rungs to a ladder, that ladder is taller and takes more time and effort to reach the top, no matter how fast you are at climbing, where you position it, or what technique you use to climb.

How a Backconnect Proxy Works

A backconnect proxy is similar to Tor, which I’ve said a few times already. It’s not Tor, though; Tor is its own strange beast.

A backconnect proxy essentially works just like a normal proxy. You have all of the same configurations and all of the same benefits and drawbacks, for the most part. The primary difference is in the proxy server itself, or, rather, the network.

A backconnect proxy is not a single proxy server machine, forwarding data and serving it up with different referrers or headers. Instead, it’s a swarm of different machines and different configurations. You might have a pool of 20, or 200, or 50,000, and it can scale up as much as the owner of the backconnect system wants to add to the swarm. Well, that, and how much you’re willing to pay. You’ll understand why momentarily.

The purpose of a backconnect proxy is to change your referrer data and IP, much like with a normal proxy server. The difference is, with a proxy server, you’re changing from A to B. Every connection you make through the proxy comes out as B. Even if you’re using a small rotating list of proxies, it might be B for 10 minutes, then C for 10 minutes, then D for 10 minutes, then back to B. There are footprints, patterns, and cycles people can monitor to see what’s going on.

With a backconnect proxy swarm, every time you send out a connection, the proxy connection changes. If you type in www.google.com you will get connection A returning Google’s homepage. You type in a search query and connection B sends it out, and connection C brings it back. You click on a search result and connection D sends it out, connection E brings back the page data, and so on.

The point is, the connection changes every action you take. Some backconnect proxy providers talk about having a database of millions of available proxies and tens of thousands of them available on any given day. They allow you to pretend ot be in specific geographical regions, filter our the connections you don’t want to see, and support various protocols.

The primary advantage of a backconnect proxy swarm is that you can make more requests per minute than you can using any one connection. Sites like Google, Amazon, or any site you want to scrape data from, typically have rate limits based on IP. If Google sees too many connections coming from server A, they will put a captcha on the actions involved. Even if you pass it, too many connections will get you rate limited for minutes at a time.

With a backconnect proxy, you can use a piece of software like Xrumer, GScraper, Scrapebox, Zenno Poster, or GSA Ranker without worrying about rate limits. Every connection you send out goes through a different IP address and port, and reaches Google from a different connection. Google won’t be able to group them together to impose a rate limit; if they add a rate limit to one IP, it doesn’t matter. The next connection you request is from a different IP anyways.

On the other hand, because a backconnect proxy connection is actually potentially hundreds or thousands of different connections, it has two major drawbacks. The first is the expense; these lists tend to be very expensive to gain access to. The second is wildly varying quality. Some connections will be fast, some will be slow, and some might be banned by the service you’re trying to access. You have very little ability to control them.

Tor works in a similar way as a backconnect proxy, except that Tor bounces your connection around between internal proxies rather than through one that changes. With a backconnect proxy, you always just have one proxy between you and the destination. With Tor, you have an undefined number from inside their cloud.

How a Reverse Proxy Works

Reverse proxies are a bit different, in that they don’t work for you, they work for a website. They aren’t proxies that help you keep yourself anonymous, and in fact, they aren’t something you can use in casual web browsing at all. Instead, they’re something that companies and websites use to protect themselves from various types of connections, or to use as filters, firewalls, or additional security.

Essentially, a web server might be one server or a set of them, but they don’t connect directly to the internet. Instead, they connect to the reverse proxy. That reverse proxy acts like the web server. You as a web browser connect to the website and just see the proxy; you don’t see any of the servers behind it. The proxy pretends to be the web server, while performing features like hiding the true server IP.

There are a lot of different reasons why a company might use a reverse proxy system.

• The company can hide details of their actual internal server structure, making it harder to access or compromise those servers. Hacking protection, essentially.
• The reverse proxy can use firewall settings to help protect against DDoS attacks. That proxy can soak up the stress of a DDoS and pass through legitimate traffic without hurting the performance of the real web servers. Of course, as with a door with a crowd trying to pass through, it can still be a bottleneck, but it’s not the kind of bottleneck that compromises user data when it fails.
• The reverse proxy might be equipped with hardware that speeds up the verification of SSL certificates, which makes SSL connections faster and less prone to being exploited.
• If there are several internal web servers that have redundant data on them, a reverse proxy can act as a load balancer, making sure each of the internal servers is low-stress. This is particularly useful when each individual server is of minimal power but together they form a potent source of resources.
• Reverse proxies can be used as caches for dynamic content, by providing dynamic data to multiple clients at once when the request is the same. This process is called web acceleration.
• Reverse proxies can handle data compression for the web servers, to provide faster connections and lower stress primary web servers.
• Reverse proxies serve to unify web addresses when the access address has to remain the same. If you have five web servers, normally they would each have their own IP address. This would make it difficult for a static script to access, because it would be forced to access the IP specified, and that server might be busy. There are many ways around this, of course, but a reverse proxy that uses its own IP address and delivers requests to whichever server is open is a great one.
• Reverse proxies can be used for split testing purposes by routing traffic in equal measures to content served on two different web servers, rather than requiring that the tester use links or script-based tagging to divide traffic between options.

Again, all of this is only for the benefit of the company and website operating the system. A client sending traffic to the site gets no anonymity benefits or any of the other perks of a proxy. They can, however, use a proxy without disrupting a reverse proxy, and vice versa. They are perfectly compatible because they fill different roles.

The post How Reverse Proxies and Backconnect Proxies Work appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

The purpose and usefulness of proxy servers has become a well-known internet tool.  Using an intermediary between your computer and the “world wide web” is almost a necessary tool in today’s technology-driven world.

According to a 2014 survey, the number one reason that people engage with proxy servers is due to “access geo-blocked social platforms or media content.” The data also revealed that the majority of individuals using proxy servers or a VPN were 25-34 years of age.

Proxy Servers vs. VPN

While both a Proxy and VPN service will re-route your internet traffic and change your IP address, they function slightly differently.

Proxy

• Acts as a Web Filter
• Browser Based: Proxy settings are applied to your web browser regardless which browser you use

VPN (Virtual Private Network)

• A VPN service provider encrypts all of your traffic and routes all communications through the traffic
• The VPN can be easily connected or disconnected with the click of a button
• Everything is routed through the VPN server and there is no ability to choose which applications will get run through your Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• Most home users use proxy servers and not a VPN.

Why Time-Outs Occur

From time-to-time, you receive a “timed-out” error notice in the middle of your computer screen when using a proxy server.

The purpose of a server timeout is to prevent a device from endlessly waiting for a response. No one enjoys watching that spinning circle on their computer without any result, but there are numerous reasons an error message may pop up.

A server connection timeout usually means that a server is taking too long to reply to a data request made from another device. Unfortunately, a proxy server connection timeout error message simply identifies that the error occurred and does provides little insight into what went wrong or why the error happened

When the server “gives up” trying to establish a connection, it presents the user with a message that the states the task has failed or is incomplete.  No one likes to see the word “failure” on their computer, but remember, you are not personally at fault, so don’t take this error and failure message to heart.

Timeout errors can take place for a number of reasons and may be related to the software, browser or network settings you have on your computer.

• The requesting device, the network hardware and even an Internet connection can be at fault

• The server is trying to connect to a proxy that doesn’t exist

• The proxy server could be offline (this is rare, but it does occur)

• The program could have the wrong address or the address was typed incorrectly

• The proxy service connection settings do not allow enough time to receive a response from the proxy website before the service closes the connection

• Some advertising or spam blocking or content-filtering software is blocking the connection

• The request was blocked by a firewall and router port blocking setting

• The system experienced an “Activation error and Proxy authentication is required.”

Resolutions

Unlike giving a child a time-out with a finite ending time, when the proxy server is unable to connect, there is no pre-determined time for the problem to end. You have to take action on your own to end the frustration.

Most proxy services and servers have a pre-determined time to wait for a response.  The majority wait for one minute on the initial attempt to connect and two minutes before it times out.

It would be awesome if there was one simple solution to resolve proxy time outs across all browsers, but regretfully, that is not the case. However, there are some universal steps you can take to try to resolve the problem on your own.

HTTP Proxies

If you believe you have the correct URL for a proxy server, you can try these potential solutions:

1. Check your internet connection…yes, this is a basic task that solves a majority of problems, but you would be surprised how often this check gets overlooked
2. Flush the DNS (Domain Name Servers). The DNS is used by computers to convert web addresses into the IP addresses.
3. Be sure to clear all browsing data including temporary internet files, cookies and cache (the place where your browser saves copies of previously visited web pages)Check proxy settings to increase the web timeout settings.  For example, on Google Chrome, this feature is located under “advanced settings”. On Internet Explorer go to the “start button” and look for “tools”. In Firefox it is under “options. In Safari it is under “select preferences”.
4. Remove unused browser add-ons if you are using Internet Explorer. According to Microsoft, “…some add-ons can cause your computer to stop responding… (so) you might want to disable all add-ons to see if that solves the problem.”
5. Check your device’s firewall settings. You may find that you need to uninstall any website or URL software that may be filtering websites on your computer
6. Also examine your antivirus settings to determine if the particular proxy site you are using is currently blocked. Occasionally, legitimate proxy servers can be added to the “bad proxy list” incorrectly. But beware!  If you unblock all servers, your computer will have less protection against websites that have malware and damaging viruses. Just keep in mind, reputable antivirus software automatically blocks threatening websites, so you will not want to disable this program completely. Specific websites can be blocked for specific users through “site filters” and “forbidden sites”, and sites with specific content can also be blocked with a similar method, a process that is very useful when children and adults share the same devices.
7. Run your computer’s antivirus program to assure any threats that may cause issues with your browsers are removed. Some viruses can change the browser and proxy configurations, which causes your browser to fail to connect to websites.
8. Uninstall and then reinstall your web browsers to the most updated version
9. Practice patience…if only one website has a timeout issue, that specific website may be down and the host of the site may have to resolve the problem
10. Try another browser. Before you give-up, there may be a problem with a particular browser

Which Proxy Server to Use

One word of caution…Every day, even every hour, new public proxy servers pop-up and some last for only a few days.  It is essential that you select a credible and legitimate proxy server that is interested in more than just making money and/or stealing your personal and business information.

You will want to avoid redirecting your entire browsing through unknown proxy servers, especially if you are using passwords. Follow these simple tips to keep yourself and your technology gadgets safe:

• Check the age of the domain. Before browsing with a web proxy site, go to sc, enter the domain name there and see when it was created. If it was created less than two years ago, you may want to be leery of using it. The older the domain and website is the better.
• Privacy. Assure that the proxy server is private to only your IP. If it is not exclusive, it will cause issues down the line.
• Check for a disclaimer or Terms of Service. Proxy URLs that are reliable sites either provide easy access to a disclaimer and/or terms of service. The best also make their privacy policy available

Finding Suppliers with Reliable Proxies

As mentioned, there are hundreds, if not thousands of proxy server lists. Here are few rules of thumb for you to consider in identifying legitimate proxy servers:

• Do a lot (and we mean a lot) of research before choosing a proxy server. Visit well-known blogs and corporate websites to view their list of top proxy servers
• Reviews from other users are usually brutally honest and are helpful in determining the reliability and honesty of a proxy list
• Learn how frequently the current proxies are checked, how often new proxies are added and if the proxy list is purged for non-operating servers
• Reputable companies offering proxies will almost always have some sort of guarantee such as a 30 day money back guarantee where you can cancel online at any time
• Almost always, paying for proxy servers delivers higher security and discretion
• Trustworthy proxy servers have an easy-to-use customer support department
• Choose a proxy server that can be used from any location
• Investigate the country of origin since many foreign free proxy lists are tagged as inaccurate
• Check the features of the proxy…you’ll likely want one that hides your identity while surfing online
• Believe it or not, some free proxy lists state “use at your own risk.” If this warning appears on anything you intend to download, stop immediately and run away quickly
• If you are computer aficionado, you may want to review the proxies by port number, by country of origin or by proxy type. A reliable supplier of proxy servers may offer this information

Public vs Private Proxy Servers

Public proxy servers also referred to as “free proxies” or “P2P,” look appealing and are tempting. But beware! These free anonymous proxy servers rarely provide a guarantee of privacy protection. In fact, the often the true owners of the listed free proxies do not know they are open to anybody else.

There are hundreds of lists available at no charge, but for the most part, the proxy servers itemized provide little security. Free proxy servers often open up your computer to a host of risks and operation issues including:

• Most free proxies rarely work well and many “die” after just a short period of time. This is the most common reason for public proxy timeouts
• The majority are undependable…they work today and then don’t work the next time you want to use them
• When they do work, they are very slow and cause more frustration than satisfaction
• Public or free proxies often put computers, networks and data at a huge security risk
• The vast majority (if not all) publicly available free Proxy Servers expose your data to hackers and malicious activities
• Public Proxy Servers expose your data to unscrupulous cyber villains who are looking to obtain and sell your private information

Warning: Proxy Hacking

Most common when using free proxy servers, proxy hacking occurs when an attacker attempts to steal information from the user.

This form of hacking can be also be used to deliver pages with malicious intent. Proxy hacking can direct users to fake banking site to steal account details which can then be sold or used to steal funds from the account. The attacker can also use the hack to direct users to a malware-infected site to compromise their machines for a variety of illegal purposes.

The Better Option

There is a better option. A private proxy, also known as a dedicated proxy, is a proxy that is not accessible to anyone else.

The main benefits of private proxies are:

• The private proxy is dedicated just to you and cannot be infiltrated
• Private proxies have a fast infrastructure and deliver immediate results when surfing the internet
• A private proxy saves time because you are not competing with other users
• Browsing sessions are private and secure
• This secure, private proxy can keep your information safe and protect against cyber criminals.
• A private proxy keeps your identity and internet privacy safe from the eyes of others
• A private proxy allows you to keep your browsing history secret
• Private proxies are highly anonymous and completely hide your real geographical location and IP address

The choice is yours. For your company of personal usage, there should be no question in your mind as to what type of proxy server delivers the best service and protection. Most experts agree that if you want a reliable anonymous proxy, don’t waste your time looking for a free proxy server. A better decision is to find a trustworthy commercial proxy service with a clear privacy policy and responsible customer service.

A Final Word

Reliable and credible proxy servers are certainly available and are used mostly used by networks in businesses. Proxy servers have many advantages, but choosing an untrustworthy site can lead to problems. If you know you are connecting to a trusted proxy server, but receive a “timed-out” message, try our tips to resolve any issues.

The post What Causes Proxy Connections to Time Out? appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

No one would question that the popularity of the social media space is increasing every day. Data reveals that 58% of Americans use some sort of social network.

For content managers and SEO marketers, the challenge is to manage the massive amount of social media posts, advertising and analytics. For example, signing into multiple social accounts is time consuming and inefficient.

And signing into several accounts on the same IP address on places like Facebook and Twitter is a high risk behavior:

• Your profile can be deleted if you have multiple accounts on the same IP address
• You could be blocked by your internet server provider (ISP)
• Your email messages are more likely to end up as “spam”

A Simple Solution

One answer to avoiding these hazards is to use a proxy server (or rather, many proxy servers). The purpose and usefulness of proxy servers has become a well-known internet tool.  Using an intermediary between your computer and the “world wide web” is almost a necessary tool in today’s technology-driven world.

One word of caution…Every day, even every hour, new proxy servers pop-up and some last for only a few days.  It is essential that you select a credible and legitimate proxy server that is interested in more than just making money and/or stealing your personal and business information.

You will want to avoid redirecting your entire browsing activities through unknown proxy servers, especially if you are using passwords. Follow these simple tips to keep yourself and your technology gadgets safe:

• Check the age of the domain. Before browsing with a web proxy site, go to sc, enter the domain name there and see when it was created. If it was created less than two years ago, you may want to be leery of using it. The older the domain and website is the better.
• Privacy. Assure that the proxy server is private to only your IP. If it is not exclusive, it will cause issues down the line.
• Check the Disclaimer or Terms of Service.
• Proxy URLs that are reliable sites either provide easy access to a disclaimer and/or terms of service. The best also make their privacy policy available.

Public vs Private Proxy Servers

Public proxy servers also referred to as “free proxies,” look appealing and are tempting. But beware! These free anonymous proxy servers rarely provide a guarantee of privacy protection. In fact, often the true owners of the listed free proxies do not know they are open to anybody else.

There are hundreds of lists available at no charge, but for the most part, the proxy servers itemized aren’t anonymous and are slow and unreliable. Free proxy servers often open up your computer to a host of risks and operation issues.

• Most free proxies rarely work well and many “die” after just a short period of time
• The majority are undependable…they work today and then don’t work the next time you want to use them
• When they do work, they are very slow and cause more frustration than satisfaction
• Public or free proxies often put computers, networks and data at a huge security risk
• The vast majority (if not all) publicly available free Proxy Servers expose your data to hackers and malicious activities
• Public Proxy Servers expose your data to unscrupulous cyber villains who are looking to obtain and sell your private information

Therefore, it makes sense to purchase private proxies to create and access several social media accounts for your marketing needs. It is one of the simplest ways to promote your products efficiently on a variety of social media accounts.

Dedicated Proxies

As part of any social media marketing plan, dedicated proxies are considered a necessity. These private proxies allow a business to:

• Be 100% anonymity
• Operate fast, reliably and efficiently
• Have the ability to engage in internet social media sites worldwide
• Reach the target segment effectively
• Avoid threats of becoming blocked
• Create multiple accounts while marketing

Dedicated proxies provide the ability to comment, post, tweet and maximize the benefits of social media marketing. Utilizing a dedicated proxy server opens the door to creating numerous accounts in social media marketing without the hassle of the website being blocked.

The countless benefits of engaging in multiple private proxies in various social media sites is clear and provides a simple method to maximize your time and productivity.

Analyzing Consumer Behavior

Analysis of your social media visitors is essential to track the success of marketing programs, promotions and posts. Private proxies are also beneficial in allowing a business to gather social media intelligence and gauge what target demographic users saying about the products or services of a company.

Choosing Your Software

Too many marketers are still unaware that they can manage all their social media accounts from a single dashboard. The tedious task of logging in to each and every individual network to compose new posts, check the activities of followers, respond to conversations and requests is time consuming and no longer necessary with the unique software offerings available.

Buffer

Since its beginning in 2010, Buffer has provided management for several social media profiles from one central place. This software helps manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Those who use Buffer rave about its simple, clean, and intuitive tool as an easy-to-use program. Buffer allows you to:

• Log in just once to manage everything across social media platforms
• Perform multiple actions in the same area (sharing, scheduling, analyzing)

AccountsDominator

Part of the TWT Dominator family for Twitter, AccountsDominator addresses needs of individuals or organizations to create multiple email and social media accounts with minimal effort.

AccountsDominator even supports Pinterest and LinkedIn through its dynamic user interface.

MassPlanner

This software is exactly what its name sounds like.

It provides automation for a mass of social media sites including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram. MassPlanner delivers multiple benefits in a variety of price ranges starting at $9.95:

• Schedules all social media updates for future publishing
• Automatically finds new Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn Groups in your niche to help extend your audience and attract new customers
• Delivers unique content that can be automatically shared with the groups belong to which is a guaranteed way to increase interaction and engagement to your posts
• Find and automatically follow Twitter/Pinterest/Google+/Instagram accounts with Mass Planner based on keywords for your niche

Facebook – Leader of the Pack

These days, most businesses have gotten the message loud and clear that they need a presence on Facebook. In December 2015, there were 1.04 billion daily active users on Facebook which was up 12% from the previous year.

The effect of Facebook on ecommerce is undisputable…some estimates suggest that 51% of people are more likely to make a purchase after “liking” a brand on Facebook.

It is a well-known fact Facebook’s rules and standards ban having more than one personal account. If they find out you have two (or more) personal accounts, they’ll shut them down without a second thought. Remember, Facebook profiles are meant for people, while Facebook Pages are meant for businesses.

For business, Facebook offers “Business Manager.” It allows organizations to securely share and control access to their Pages, ad accounts and other assets on Facebook. Anyone in company can see all of the Pages and ad accounts they work on in one place. However, they do not share without login information or become connected to their coworkers on Facebook.

Regardless you’ll want to take steps to avoid being kicked off this social media site. Whatever type of account you open on Facebook, be sure to complete all the fields properly, add profile data and upload cover pictures.

Many users turn to Face Dominator to assist in their Facebook social media plans. FaceDominator is a popular tool to help support the managing and automation of Facebook. In fact, you can choose from several free tools that are available from FaceDominator to run your marketing strategy efficiently and effectively on Facebook.

FaceDominator’s program provides for:

• Creating unlimited reports
• Adding multiple friends
• Managing fan pages
• Unlimited campaigns
• Frequently updates to keep up with the demands of social media
• …and most importantly, FaceDominator can create an unlimited variety of accounts on Facebook

All this for the affordable price of $4.99 per month.

Twitter

This 140 character limit social media phenomenon now boasts over 645 million users that send 58 million tweets daily. The term “tweet” is now common usage in our everyday vernacular.

Twitter marketing software is readily available and can be a powerful tool to save time and maximize your exposure on Twitter. The majority of these programs offer several benefits:

• Automatically follows users that are in looking for your products and services
• Automatically follows the “followers” of users who are already popular in your niche
• Protects your account from getting banned
• Ignores users with no pictures and who tweet links in order to minimize following spammers
• Uses an unlimited number of accounts
• Post and schedule thousands of tweets
• Automatically follow users with the same interest
• Includes anti-spam filtering

Twitter can be a challenge to manage and to develop compelling 140 word content.

Recently, Tweet Demon burst onto the scene and many believe it is the ultimate Twitter tool.

Reviews of Tweet Demon tout its highly effective features including:

• Ability to target customers easily and effectively with user-friendly interface automation
• Multi account management that allows you to add unlimited accounts
• Support Proxies: User/Pass Authentication, IP authentication
• Built in proxy checker
• Follow people from lists and searches
• “Unfollows” users who have not followed you back within a given time frame
• Send mass message to your followers all at once or to a selected number of followers
• Post tweets, post images from multi accounts.
• Advanced scraping
• Take a keyword phrase “finds’ people that are talking about that keyword phrase and reply to them

You might also consider TWTDominator for managing multiple Twitter accounts. TWTDominator has extremely useful benefits:

• Manage multiple twitter accounts
• Enhance your following and follower list
• Optimized management of tweets, retweets and replies
• Follows your all followers in a single click
• Automate your twitter activity using the Campaign Manager tool
• Filter your users based on tweets, followers and location
• Easily change twitter registered email ID, password, screen name
• Compatible with any http proxies, but private proxy recommended

Instagram

There are such things as “Instagram Proxies.” These are dedicated IPs exclusively for Instagram. Who would have guessed?

As marketers, there may be occasions where you have to create more than one account in Instagram to boost your product or brand. If you do this from the same computer, the program can track the address and identify that it is a fake account. To avoid this, you need dedicated Instagram proxies which will help you to create multiple accounts and handle them from a single computer.

Most people who post images and videos about their products on Instagram would like to get the maximum exposure for their posts. But unless you are Coca-Cola or Selena Gomez, this presents a monumental challenge.

When people initially open an Instagram account, they often create “fake followers” via their dedicated proxies. However, you have to be careful while selecting the proxies. There are many resources in the internet which provide these types of proxies, but you should beware that Instagram also has a banned list of some of these proxies.

If you happen to use any of those, your account is likely to get banned. To avoid this, you have to be very careful while downloading the proxies from the internet.

Private proxies are the only safe bet.

Avoiding Bans on Your Accounts

Social media analysts believe 95% of the time a social media account is banned from Facebook is due to people in the groups you posted decide to mark your entry as spam. To avoid bans on your social media accounts, follow some simple steps:

• Do not post to hundreds of groups per day and do nothing else on the account. Instead, take a variety of actions on your account
• Make friends…just like in real life, a person (or social media account) with no followers or no friends looks suspicious
• Grow slowly over a period of time. For example, if you have never posted on a group but then you join 50 groups in one day, this will be considered strange behavior. Specifically for Instagram, start with posting your own photos, at least 10 of them over the period of several days….not too many at one time. If you post too many entries too quickly on an account, some sites will assume you opened your account for spam. Many social media sites, including Facebook, permit only a low number of spam reports required before they penalize an account
• Many social media sites give more leeway to accounts who have been around for a while and not just opened
• Verifying the accounts with a phone number allows the account appear more legitimate
• Always fill out your profile completely, including uploading your profile photo and writing a short bio if the social media site requests this information

Post regularly. For most sites, twice a week is enough if you can’t do daily posts.

In Conclusion

According to Brand Watch, 38% of organizations plan to spend more than 20% of their total advertising budgets on social media channels in 2015, up from 13% a year ago. As social media presence grows and businesses examine how to get the most out of their social media plans, it is clear that each organization will be considering multiple accounts.

The question is, which software will you use, and how will you choose your proxy source?

The post How to Use Proxies to Create Bulk Social Accounts appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

If you are reading this post, you likely already are familiar with ScrapeBox, dubbed by the company itself as “The Swiss Army Knife of SEO” for its versatility and wide distribution. ScrapeBox is considered by many to be an awesome SEO tool that can also make the process of link prospecting much easier. ScrapeBox or (SB for short) has become popular among webmasters and web developers especially for Google harvesting and scraping and for blog commenting. ScrapeBox that it can even scrape articles on the internet within five minutes or less.

This software supports the constant daily demands for SEO and Internet Marketing of companies of all sizes. It is also a beneficial tool for individuals and freelancers worldwide.

As it names suggests, ScrapeBox collects (or scrapes) information off of the internet. Some of its features include:

• Harvesting of proxies
• Being able to create a sitemap of a website
• Ability to make a RSS feed
• Collecting keyword ideas
• Backlink checker
• Domain name checker
• Collecting websites based on a footprint
• And more…

Answers When the Harvester Isn’t Working

From time to time, the harvester in ScrapeBox may fail to provide the data you are requesting.

If you are scraping a search engine (such as Google), and you are not getting any results to your query, it is generally due to one of a couple reasons:

1. The terms you are scraping simply do not have any results to return.
2. Your proxies are blocked or some other error is happening. The easiest way to check this is go to the settings menu. Uncheck “use multi-threaded harvester”.  Then try again to perform the harvest request. ScrapeBox will display each query, the proxy used and the result, including any error messages. For example:

If you see lines that say:
Results 0 completed using proxy xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxx , then it means that the request finished, but the engine returned no results.

If you see:
Results 0 Error xxx received using proxy xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxx – Then you can look at the error message and generally determine the problem.

Issues with the Harvester

Generally speaking when you have a problem with ScrapeBox’s Harvester tools these are the basic steps to follow.

1. Restart your computer…a solution for a myriad of issues.
2. It may be that the proxies that were found are not acceptable on the search engine you are using. To check this, try another proxy site that is not banned to see if it goes through
3. Update ScrapeBox to the latest version. Frequently, the updated version provides a solution to fix the problem.
4. You may need to authenticate your proxies for your local server IP address. This can usually be done from the online portal of your proxy provider. However, if your proxies are properly authenticated, and you are still experiencing issues with using them, it is likely that there is an issue with your proxies such as “connections refused or timed out” or 404 errors (the proxy is damaged). If you experience connection failures like this, the best thing to do is to reboot your proxies. This may involve contacting your proxy provider.
5. Take a moment to go back thru your settings and double check all of the most obvious things particularly “maximum connections” and “RND Delay Range.” Often a simple setting can cause great grief.
6. Reinstall the ScrapeBox software. Yes, reinstalling any program is a pain, but it may be the simplest way to solve the problem. Then re-download the latest version of ScrapeBox and try your request again
7. Visit You-Tube. Both the creator of ScrapeBox as well as other knowledgeable “geeks” have posted short tutorials on troubleshooting that should help resolve the majority of issues
8. If all else fails contact support directly: http://www.ScrapeBox.com/contact-us

Error Codes for a Troubled Harvester

If there is a problem with the harvester, a specific error message may be received. For a complete explanation on all error codes choose the “help menu” in ScrapeBox: Help -> Server Error Code Reference.

The most common error messages you will receive are:

• Error 302 – Your IP is blocked
• Error 404 – the proxy is bad or was never found
• Error 407 – your proxy requires authentication
• Error 500 when commenting to WordPress…your data is bad, most likely your email addresses are invalid. Double check to assure you entered a valid email address

The Handy Harvester

Those who own ScrapeBox have several options in using the harvester:

Search Engine Harvester

ScrapeBox has the capability to harvest thousands of URL’s from over 30 search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing in seconds through its powerful and trainable URL harvester.

One of the biggest advantages of the ScrapeBox Search Engine Harvester is the huge potential for detailed statistics. By running this harvester, a myriad of statistics will divulge the number of results obtained for every keyword in every search engine.

The harvester can also save the keyword with every harvested URL so you can easily identify what keywords produced what results.

SEO gurus praise the harvesting of URL’s with ScrapeBox to identify high PageRank sites and say this is where ScrapeBox does its magic. When you choose “Select Start Harvesting,” ScrapeBox will automatically search for related blog sites containing the keywords you selected. Results can be filtered, sorted and manipulated to provide the exact information you need. Then you have the ability to export the data as an excel sheet for easy use.

Keyword Harvester

ScrapeBox features a lightning fast, multi-threaded keyword scraper.

This tool is capable of taking one or more keywords and scraping thousands of related keywords in just a few seconds. The ScrapeBox Keyboard Harvester is able to produce thousands of long-tail keywords from a single base keyword. (As a reminder, long-tail keywords are extremely valuable to folks working with SEO. Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling and are essential when customer uses a highly specific search phrase).

Why is this important? If you offer a product or service ScrapeBox’s Keyword Harvester can provide detailed data on the keywords and key phrases people are searching for. This valuable harvester tool offers a simple method for optimizing your company’s websites SEO or products to target exactly people are searching for….which leads to a higher conversion rate.

Proxy Harvester

Included in ScrapeBox are a powerful proxy harvester and tester. This handy proxy checker allows you to check if your proxies are working properly. It also permits the user to keep their work private through the use of thousands of free proxies. Usually the best way to find a Google proxy is to use the built-in ScrapeBox Proxy Harvester.

Since lists of proxy websites are published daily, it is virtually impossible to manually visit each site and test them. ScrapeBox’s Proxy Manager offers a far simpler solution. It has 22 proxy sources already built in, plus it allows you to add custom sources by adding the URL’s of any sites that publish proxies.

When you run the Proxy Harvester, it will visit each website and extract all the proxies from the pages and automatically remove the duplicate proxies that may be published on multiple web sites. So with one click you can pull in thousands of proxies from numerous websites.

For your proxies to work with URL Profiler, they will need to be authenticated. You can either authenticate via IP address or username and password.

If your proxies are not authenticated, ScrapeBox will respond with a “failed” message for that specific proxy URL.

A key benefit to the ScrapeBox Proxy Harvester is that is has a “Trainable Proxy Scanner” feature. This means you can fully configure where you want to scrape proxies and meet any specific needs of your business.

Customize Harvester

The ScrapeBox Custom Harvester is an additional feature included (at no charge) when you purchase ScrapeBox. It allows you the freedom to add your own search engines to ScrapeBox. This allows the user to harvest from virtually any URL’s from just about any website that has a search feature.

A Few Additional SEO Tools

The Scrapebox harvester can be used for more than scraping proxies. Once you have your proxies working, you can try them with:

The Backlink Checker

Every SEO enthusiast loves backlinks. Links are truly the building blocks of SEO and they play a major role in the ranking power of any website.

The number of backlinks is one of the indicators of the popularity or importance of the article. Leading search engines, especially Google, will give higher consideration to these websites if they possess a number of quality backlinks.

Quality is the key here. When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality inbound links to that site.

ScrapeBox includes a free backlink checker and allows up to 1,000 links returned in the report. This is great tool for doing backlink audits for your website, or doing competitive analysis to view the URL’s where your competitors have obtained their backlinks. So if you need to find out where your competitors are getting their links you will want to employ this excellent feature.

The Bulk URL Shortener

If your business regularly uses Facebook or Twitter it is essential that the URL be shortened in order to make it fit within the specified number of characters. The majority of programs allow the user to only do this process one URL at a time…a method that is not feasible when you have dozens of URLs to compact all at the same time.

One of the more popular Add-Ons from ScrapeBox is the URL Shortener. All you have to do is type in your list of URLs and you will almost instantly receive the new, shorter links you require.

The WHOIS Checker

Without this tool, it becomes a pain to check ownership of multiple websites on WHOIS.com. ScrapeBox delivers an easy solution. Their WHOIS Checker is a reliable tool that can check multiple domain names simultaneously with a click of a button.

A Final Word

The conversation of white hat vs. black hat SEO is a popular topic these days. For the most part, “white hat” is seen as being ethical and contributing to the web and not spamming while “black hat” is viewed as spamming the web to benefit your site. Originally, ScrapeBox was thought to be a black hat tool of darkness.

Today, the updates, features and innovations of ScrapeBox have moved it into the realm of a white hat SEO gadget, finding new life as a timesaver that is simple to learn and relatively inexpensive to purchase.

Although ScrapeBox is a Windows only software, it delivers a helpful set of tools to organize and speed up manual searches and link processing. SB delivers an overwhelming amount of power that can help speed up daily tasks, support a variety of SEO projects and overall production.

ScrapeBox software requires only a one-time payment for a lifetime license. This includes all updates (there have been over 400 updates since ScrapeBox was released in 2009), loads of free add-ons and hundreds of add-on updates. All you have to do now is start harvesting.

The post Why the Harvester on Your ScrapeBox Isn’t Working appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

If you are a marketer who is engaged in powerful social media tools (and these days, who can afford not to be), then you already know about Follow Liker. This multi-purpose software allows for time-saving automation on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. It permits individuals and companies of all sizes to their promote products, their brands, share information and even promote themselves.

Follow Liker is powerful software that is simple to set-up and use to allow just about anyone to run a successful social media strategy. Follow Liker can automatically run Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest sites 24 hours per day with some effort and set-up at the beginning.

Some of the other benefits of Follow Liker include:

• Twitter: Follow and unfollow users on Twitter as well as schedule tweets, post and reply to tweets, retweet and send messages
• Instagram: Share and comment on photos on Instagram like and unlike photos, Tweet, user and photo search
• Pinterest: And on Pinterest, Follow Link permits the user to like & unlike pins, repin and comment pin

When you first start using Follow Liker you might be a little overwhelmed by the enormous attributes of this software. For example, you can pretty much load as many tweets as you want into the software it will send them out at any interval(s) you choose. Once you get started, you’ll understand that it is worth investing the time to review the User Guide in order to get the most out of Follow Liker.

For starters, you’ll need to get your proxies working to use the software.

Using Proxies for Follow Liker

Most SEO and marketing professional are familiar with benefits proxy servers. Proxies process the internet requests made by the users. They act as a go-between for a computer and the internet.

In short, proxies are an intermediary between your computer and the “world wide web.” Most professionals consider them a necessary tool in today’s technology-driven world.

When using Follow Liker, the user is integrating several accounts across multiple social media platforms. This requires numerous proxies to support the functions of the multiple accounts in order to prevent it from getting blocked or completely stopped. When connected with proxies, the IP address becomes invisible and instead shows IP of proxy servers. This protects the user and delivers privacy when surfing the web.

Authentication of proxies is an important action that is needed for optimum effectiveness of proxy use. Authentication on the proxy requires users to identify themselves. If you receive an authentication error message, it can be a result of:

• Proxy server connection may not be configured correctly
• The username and password is incorrect. Double check your login information
• The credentials are invalid

Although proxies can be downloaded for free, private proxies are the best proxies for Follow Liker users.

The port setting can also play a key role in the process. As an example, let’s say you’re behind a firewall that is configured to allow connection only on port 80 would not be able to use proxies that are configured to work on another port number. So would deselect all these ports except port 80.

Why Choose Private Proxies for Follow Liker

Free proxies are never the best choice to use if you are concerned about the privacy and safety of your information.

Every day, even every hour, new proxy servers pop-up and become available at “no charge.” Unfortunately, these are mostly unreliable proxies and some last for only a few days.

It is essential that you select a credible and legitimate proxy server that is interested in more than just making money and/or stealing your personal and business information. Public or free proxies often put computers, networks and data at a huge security risk. Private proxies are the only reliable option.

The majority (if not all) publicly available free proxy servers expose your data to hackers and malicious activities. In addition, these unsecured free proxies are very slow and cause more frustration than satisfaction.

Using private proxies is safer, more reliable, and easier.

Private proxies use quality proxy servers and allow information passes through safe channels keeping the hackers at long distance. Also known as a dedicated proxy, a private proxy is not accessible or available to anyone else.

The main benefits of private proxies are:

• Private proxies have a fast infrastructure and deliver immediate results when surfing the internet
• The private proxy is dedicated just to you and cannot be infiltrated
• A private proxy saves time because you are not competing with other users
• Browsing sessions are private and secure
• This secure, private proxy can keep your information safe and protect against cyber criminals
• A private proxy keeps your identity and internet privacy safe from the eyes of others
• A private proxy allows you to keep your browsing history secret
• Private proxies are highly anonymous and completely hide your real geographical location and IP address

So you are encouraged to add security and speed to your Follow Liker account with private proxies. A recommendation from current users of Follow Like is to use only one account per proxy for maximum efficiency.

Follow Liker Scraping

When using social media platforms, you will want to create specific user base. This permits you to target your campaign to specific individuals or organization that might be interested in your specific service or products.

Finding people to follow is one of the strongest benefits of Follow Liker. Follow Liker allows you to scrape the data with their tool called the “Wizard.” The process is reasonably simple:

1. After selecting Scrape User & Follow click next
2. Now set the parameters of which particular users the software should follow
3. You will also be able to choose how many users you want the data to select
4. It is highly suggested that you create multiple queries here.
   1. For example, you can set the software to find users by a keyword in their username bio or profile.
   2. Or, you can follow all of the followers of a specific user.
   3. You can also find users who are discussing a particular topic or keyword
   4. Or, you can follow back all of the people who follow you

There are a multitude of possibilities for segmenting user lists. Once you have set up the parameters, Follow Liker delivers a database of users that meet your requirements.

A few tips and reminders when determining your scraping setttings:

• “Scrape User Limit” is the amount of users Follow Liker will scrape per each task
• “Scrape Only Top Result” will ensure that Follow Liker only scrapes the users on the top of the search queries.
  • Using this option may limit the amount users scraped
  • This is a useful setting if you are scraping your users based on hashtags.
• “Ignore private users” will ensure that no private users are scraped or followed
• “Ignore users with no profile picture” will ensure that users with no profile picture will not be scraped or followed.

Follow Liker is an extremely valuable function in Instagram when scraping for:

• “Users Who Liked” will find users who have liked a specific photo. To use this query, enter the URL of the photo or the ID of the photo in the “Query” value.
• “Users Who Commented” will find users who have commented a specific photo. To use this query, enter the URL of the photo or the ID of the photo in the “Query” value.
• User’s Follower”. The reason following other people’s followers has good “follow-back” rate is because Instagram sorts the followers from newest to latest. So when a new user follows an account he will be on the top of the list of followers. That means you will be following active people who are likely to “follow you back.”

And since many of Instagrammers use emojis in their comments its good know to know the emojis are supported by Follow Liker.

Hashtag and Keywords

One of the most useful features of Follow Liker is the ability to follow social media users that are discussing a topic by a hashtag or keyword. The “auto-find users” is a feature on Follow Link that allows you to follow others based on keywords you select.

This software is also helpful when performing a photo search. Follow Liker has an auto-find photo feature. This benefit of the software encourages pictures to be liked and be commented on based on keyword and hashtag choices. Just remember you need to enter the hashtag symbol (#) as well as the word in order to receive targeted results.

Final Thoughts

Follow Liker is recognized as one of the best automation software for social media. It is a tool that will save you a lot of time so that you can focus on strategy and other important aspects of social media, instead of the logistics.

Follow Liker provides numerous useful features and whether you have just one twitter account or if you have multiple social media profiles, definitely need to automate your daily tasks.

The bottom line is that Follow Liker allows you to set parameters of the jobs you want done, hit the start button, and let the tool do the heavy lifting. Since you can manage multiple accounts with Follow Liker, it is particularly useful for people who need to maintain and handle several social media tasks automatically. Plus Follow Liker will always check for new updates when you open the software.

One last suggestion…if you have a brand new Follow Liker account you should start slowly and add to your automation in incremental steps. Overtime, Follow Liker can help you keep your Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest accounts active, upload photos daily and engage with your fans to grow your accounts. The more proxies you have, the less likely they will be rate limited by your requests.

The post How to Get Your Proxies Working With Follow Liker appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

Proxies are intermediaries that are used by companies and individuals when working on the internet. Basically, a proxy server acts as a buffer between you and the internet. Proxies allow for anonymous surfing of the world wide web and are able to hide the IP address of the user.

An anonymous proxy server helps protect your location, your browsing habits and your preferences while working, shopping or playing games on-line. If you find you are blocked from accessing specific websites a proxy server can also permit access to sites blocked by a firewall.

There are seemingly an endless number of proxies that can provide you with service. You can find a list of these simply by typing “Proxy List” into any search engine. Some of are free while others charge a fee. (Usually the paid proxies are “dedicated” proxies and provide a more reliable, faster and secure experience).

If you’re looking to buy a proxy, you should know that there are several types to choose from depending on your intended use, desire for anonymity and your budget. Shared and private proxies are completely different in almost every way.

Here’s what you need to know when deciding which to purchase.

Shared Proxies

Just as its name implies, a shared proxy is utilized by multiple users. This means if you or your company decides to use a shared proxy, it will be accessible to multiple people, not just you.

Although most technology experts warn against using shared proxy servers, they do have some advantages:

• Most shared proxies inexpensive or free.
• Sharing the proxy server allows you to share in the cost of that server.
• They are useful for the rare user who requires several proxies but uses each proxy only for a few hours.
• Some public proxies can be helpful with some of SEO software that need harvest data from internet (like keyword ranking or page rank).
• They can support both an HTTP and SOCKS5 service.
• Public proxy servers can also be used with web browsers and other apps that support proxy use.

Private Proxies

A private proxy is a dedicated IP that’s highly anonymous and only used by you.

It delivers some serious advantages over shared or public proxies:

• A private proxy is a proxy that is used only one user.
• It hides your IP(or MAC) address while adding security and protecting your privacy.
• Private proxies deliver fully anonymous surfing on the internet. It is important to remember that you leave a digital footprint in the form of your IP address when using the web. This means that almost anyone can see you on-line, including hackers and spammers. A private proxy server can almost guarantee your IP address will be invisible.
• Higher speed since no one else is working with the same proxy.
• Ability to bypass filters and firewalls since a private proxy server can circumvent these types of blocked websites.
• Ability to unblock numerous applications and bypass numerous internet restrictions (i.e. unblock You-Tube, Facebook, Twitter at work or school where the “IT administrator” has restricted your access to these and similar sites).
• Protect privacy for minimal worry about your personal information being exposed or compromised when you make purchases or surf on the web.
• Deliver a higher level of security on internet since a private proxy provides a unique internet address dedicated to only you.
• Avoid and block spam successfully.

Differences in Speed:

• Public Proxy: many people can be using public proxies at the same time, overloading their bandwidth and leaving you with a frustratingly slow internet experience. In other words, slow access is generally associated with free proxies because many (many) users are typically using them at any given time.
• Private Proxy: a dedicated proxy means you, and only you, are using the proxy server. The result is reliable higher speed than a public proxy can deliver. Private proxies protect and deliver privacy with virtually no risk of having your personal information being exposed.

Differences in Security:

• Public Proxy: Free and open proxy servers have been documented to be populated with hackers and spammers. Your personal or company information, including credit card information and financial data, is dangerously exposed. A public proxy can often infiltrate your computer and gain access to passwords, credit information or even hijack your browser to attack other sites.
• Private Proxy: There is absolutely no comparison when it comes to cyber security between public and private proxies. There is always a significantly higher level of security since a private proxy provide a unique internet address dedicated to only you.

Differences in Anonymity:

• Public Proxy: The majority of public proxies are run by unscrupulous sites that are vulnerable to exposing your data. Many public proxies are also transparent, meaning that instead of hiding your IP, they merely pass it on to the website you are visiting.
• Private Proxy: A private proxy server can almost guarantee your IP address will be invisible. This allows complete concealment and security when working on the internet.

Differences in Reliability:

• Public Proxy: The vast majority (if not all) publicly available free proxy servers do not require any registration or authentication. In addition, it is insanely time consuming to test free proxies. These pubic proxies either belong to someone else, or are computers that have been compromised by hackers. As a result, free and public proxies come and go and often are not even available after just a few uses. It has even occurred that this type of proxy will go off-line while you are using it.
• Private Proxy: These dedicated proxies last considerably longer because they aren’t being abused by the whole public. Only you and no one else is using a private proxy.

Differences in Spam and Advertising:

• Public Proxy: Often the suppliers of free proxy sites sell your emаіl address to other advertising companies. It is commonplace that they install adware and viruses onto your computer. The result is unwanted advertisement banners as soon as you log on and connect соnnесt tо thе іntеrnеt. It also makes your technology devices susceptible to malware.
• Private Proxy: A dedicated proxy protects your computer and other personal information by disguising your IP address. This makes it virtually impossible for anyone to hack or install any type of malicious software onto your computer system.

Differences in Price:

Whether you decide to purchase public proxies or a private proxy, you should assure that the proxy can be used with any browser or application that you regularly employ.

The pricing of proxies ranges considerably. Some public proxy lists can be downloaded at no charge while private proxies may require a one-time-only or even monthly charge. However, you can almost be certain that private proxies will always be more expensive. You are paying for the reliability and speed.

It is also a good practice to research whether or not the price you are paying includes consumer support. The ability to access quick, accurate, and friendly support 24/7 is almost a necessity. Working on the internet is vital to the individual as well as the health of a corporation. You will want to know that if you have issues with the proxy which you cannot troubleshoot on your own, that you can contact a support team via phone, email or Live Chat.

• Public Proxy: These often free proxies end up not being free at all. They typically cause a multitude of problems and issues for most users. The true price a user of a free public proxy actually pays is the price of exposing their network to unknown and untrusted sources. Are rarely do public proxy sites provide help when the proxy fails or does not respond.
• Private Proxy: There is almost always a charge for a private proxy and the range of pricing is wide and varied. The most essential aspect when deciding on what site to rely on for your private proxy is its credibility and history of service. A “2016 Top Ten” comparison list of companies providing proxies along with features and pricing can be found here, but you will want to do some of your own research.

A Few Other Things You Should Know

• HTTP Proxy Servers. The HTTP protocol can only handle traffic that starts with http:// or shttp. It is therefore only useful for web surfing, HTTP proxies will, however, hide your IP from basic checks, but HTTP traffic is usually not encrypted.
• SOCKS Proxy Servers. The big advantage of SOCKS proxies that it supports any kind of internet traffic, but it is often a slower process.

Purpose and Use

Proxy servers have a variety of features and benefits which can be utilized for diverse purposes.

• If proxies are used as a caching web proxy, it can increase the speed of the web response. This is possible because a caching proxy returns response directly from its cache if the document already exists.
• They can be used to filter web page content such as blocking inappropriate or offensive web content from viewed by the users. This is a primary reason for corporations to engage in proxy servers.
• An anonymous proxy directs the user requests to a destination server, which ultimately has no knowledge of the source of the request. Only the proxy is aware of the source of the request, including the user IP address and location.
• Some proxies have been developed to localize and translate the content of a source website into the local language of the client’s computer.
• Usually, scraping is much faster with private proxies.

It also makes sense to check and test the proxy prior to using it. There are a few good proxy checkers out there that allow you to check hundreds of proxies per minute. ScrapeBox is one of the most popular with several positive reviewers from users. Just like proxies themselves, beware if the software is free as it may allow access to unwanted eyes during your proxy checks.

To Sum It Up

When you connect to the internet, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) assigns you an IP address. Whenever you surf the web, view emails, play video games or download a movie from the web, your IP address allows your activity and location to be tracked. To surf anonymously and protect your privacy, you’ll need to hide your real IP address with a proxy.

Browsing the internet through a proxy means that you are not accessing a website directly, but going through an intermediate “proxy” who relays the information back and forth between you and the destination website.

The top priority should always be рrоtесtіng уоur privacy and реrѕоnаl іnfоrmаtіоn. Using a рrоxу аddrеѕѕ rаthеr thаn your оwn IP аddrеѕѕ allows you to connect to other servers without revealing your personal information.

But there are varying degrees of defending against hackers that should be considered when using proxies. Public proxies are often free, but as we all know, nothing is really free in this world. Do you really want to trust your personal information to these public and high visible proxies?

Private proxies permit peace of mind so you can browse safely, securely and swiftly on the world wide web.

The post The Difference Between Shared and Private Proxies appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

Corporate networks almost always employ proxy servers. But personal computers or networks may overlook this handy solution to gain access to blocked websites. The primary reason for not putting in a private proxy at home is the perceived complexity of installation. Many believe a private proxy for home networks is too complicated if you are not a technology expert.

It is simpler than you would imagine to set up your own private proxy from home. And it is well worth the effort since a local proxy server can help to improve the broadband connection, solve a myriad of network issues and add another line of defense against malware infections.

But first, here is a quick reminder about the benefits of hosting a proxy server from home.

Proxy Servers

If you find you are blocked from accessing specific websites or you want to cruise the internet in total anonymity and hide your IP address, then a proxy server is for you. Many web filters block websites based on URLs, but a proxy acts as an intermediary for your browser and the website that you want to access. A proxy server can also permit access to sites blocked by a firewall.

By connecting to the internet through proxies, the home IP address of your machine is not shown. Instead, only the IP of the proxy server is revealed for exceptional privacy while surfing the web. Hooray for anonymity!

Web Server Proxies

Often in order to run a proxy on your home computer, you’ll need to install a local web server. Getting a basic proxy service is usually quite simple. There are many online websites that will provide the proxy directly through that website.

Unfortunately, a major downfall of a web-based proxy is that they can be easily blocked when someone notices that their rules are being bypassed through that particular website.

There are companies that offer private proxies that guarantee that you will be the only person using the assigned proxy. The best of these proxies deliver fast connections and have no restrictions on the amount of bandwidth you use. Businesses such as Ghostproxies and MRP Group provide the option of private proxies for complete anonymity. But before installing a Web Server Proxy, you’ll want to confirm that your home proxy supports HTTP/HTTPS protocols or SOCKS, as well as performs authentication by IP or username and password.

• The HTTP protocol forwards the HTTP requests to the correct servers. This method recreates the request from the original device on the proxy server, and then the proxy server forwards the exact request to the desired destination. The communication between server and device is left unhindered and open
• SOCKS: This protocol uses a “handshake” operation to initiate the connection with the proxy server. There are two frequently used operations of SOCKS ; SOCK4(a) and SOCK5. The most recent SOCK5 version offers higher levels of authentication

Another Option

Configuring the internet settings on your computer to route itself through the proxy server is another option for setting up your own private proxy from home. This method is not as simple as the previously mentioned one, but it does tend to work very well once you know how to configure everything properly. In fact, many of the popular browsers and applications, like Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer support configuration for proxy connections.

Companies that provide the proxy servers almost always provide the consumer with instructions on how to set up the home proxy. They also offer troubleshooting suggestions and “how-to” videos on their websites or You-Tube.

Setting Up a Proxy from Home

There are number of proxies that can provide you with proxy service. You can find a list of these simply by typing “Proxy List” into any search engine. Some of are free while others charge a fee. (Usually the paid proxies are more reliable, faster and more secure).

In fact, there are a multitude of PHP scripts available on internet that can be used to create a proxy server for free, but the majority requires a web server and a domain name for the proxy site. However it is possible to create a personalized proxy server without purchasing any domain name or web server.

One of the simplest methods to setting up a private proxy from home is to use the Google app engine.

Tutorials on the process are easily available, but here are the basic steps:

• Step 1: Open google.com and login in with your google account.
• Step 2: Click the “Create an Application” button.
• Step 3: Select an Application Identifier and it will become the sub-domain of  proxy server. Give a title (say My Proxy Server) to your app, set the Authentication Option “Open to all users”, create the application.
• Step 4: Go to python.org, download the 2.7 Installer and install Python. If you are using Mac, the good news is that Python 2.7 is already installed on your computer.
• Step 5: Download the application files required to create a proxy server then extract the zip file on your desktop.
• Step 6: Go to google.com, download the “Google App Engine SDK for Python” and install it. When the installation has finished, click “Run Launcher” button.
• Step 7: Inside the Google App Engine Launcher, Select Edit >> Preferences from the desktop and set the correct values for the Python Path, App Engine SDK and the Text Editor (set this is as WordPad or write.exe and not notepad.exe) as shown in the screenshot below.
• Step 8: Click File tab >> Add Existing Application under the Google App Launcher program and browse to the folder that contains the files that you extracted in Step 5. Save and close the file.
• Step 9: Hit Deploy, enter your Google account credentials and, within few seconds, your online proxy server will be deployed!

Another Choice

Several proxy server software packages are also available to help you build your own proxy server. Some of them are Windows OS based while some are Linux and Unix based.

For example, WinGate Proxy Server benefits a small business or home network. It will increase your computer’s efficiency, responsiveness and reliability.

Buyer Beware

Finding “free” proxies is relatively simple by searching the internet. But there is often a catch when these free proxies are utilized both at home and in business.

• There is a risk that the “free” proxy is actually set up by a hacker looking to obtain personal and private information
• You will encounter a large number of unwanted advertising
• It will be unreliable and often not available after just a few uses
• They rarely provide a guarantee of privacy protection
• They are very (very) slow

Troubleshooting Your Home Proxy

Unlike working at a corporation, you likely don’t have an IT department down the hall in your home.

Troubleshooting can become a challenge without this extra support. Here are some tips for the most typical issues with proxy servers:

• Authentication Error. When this message pops up usually means the username and password is incorrect. Double (and triple check) your login information.
• Logging Into Websites. Removing scripts is a good step to try when experiencing problems on websites that you want to log into.
• Slow Proxy Connection. Whenever you connect to a proxy, you should take into account the location of the server. Distance from the server will impact your top download speed.
• Connection Timed Out. Most of the time this error can be resolved be closing and restarting your compute.

Caution Urged

Setting up your own proxy is a useful project, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Some private proxies may have an additional cost for use over their stated bandwidth limit, which can become expensive. Be sure to check out the “fine print” on this feature before purchasing a private proxy for your home.
• Some users experience their browsing to slow down when they are surfing through a through a home proxy. Remember, your requests are being routed through your home proxy server every step of the way, which puts a slow middleman (your home network) between you and the websites you want to access.
• A few ISP offer limited data plans so your proxy may have performance limitations
• Some ISPs can block all traffic connected to known IP addresses belonging to a particular proxy provider
• Most private proxies are not liable for any act, direct or indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages arising out of the use of or inability to use the service
• If you use your home proxy at work, it is likely your employer can still see everything you’re doing on the internet (and your computer). Some employers actually forbid the use of any type of proxy, so if you get caught, you could face some very serious consequences.

To Sum it Up

Accessing blocked web sites has become a necessity in today’s technological world. Having a proxy that is reliable, credible and dependable is not only useful in business, but is also helpful for home users.

It is important to understand associated risks with home proxies. Although using an intermediary between your computer and the internet has numerous advantages, there is some risk associated with proxy servers, especially if you decide to use free and public proxies.

Every day, even every hour, new proxy servers pop-up and some last for only very short time.  It is essential that you select a credible and legitimate proxy server for your home that is interested in more than making money hacking into your personal data.

The post Setting Up Your Own Private Proxies from Home appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

There are a multitude of proxy server lists that can easily be found with a simple Google search. Every day, even every hour, new proxy servers pop-up and some last for only a few days.  It is essential that you select a credible and legitimate proxy server that is interested in more than just making money and/or stealing your personal and business information.

Although most people believe that private proxies are superior to public proxies, there are several benefits to public proxies. For example:

• Many public proxies are free
• They are useful for the rare user who requires several of proxies but uses each proxy for only several hours
• Public proxies can be helpful with some of SEO software that need Harvest date from internet (like keyword ranking or page rank)
• Public proxy servers can also be used with web browsers and other apps that support proxy use.

Caveats for Using Public Proxies

Regardless of the advantages of public proxies, you will want to avoid redirecting your browsing entirely through unknown proxy servers. This is especially important if you are using passwords.

If you are convinced that you want to employ a public and/or free proxy, we suggest you follow these simple tips and take precautions to keep yourself and your computer safe:

• Check the age of the domain. Before browsing with a web proxy site, go to sc, enter the domain name there and see when it was created. If it was created less than two years ago, you may want to be leery of using it. The older the domain and website is the better
• Privacy. Assure that the proxy server is private to only your IP. If it is not exclusive, it will cause issues later on during the process of surfing the web.
• Check for Disclaimer or Terms of Service.
  Proxy URLs that are reliable sites either provide easy access to a disclaimer and/or terms of service. The best also make their privacy policy available.
• Do a lot (and we mean a lot) of research before choosing a proxy server. Visit well-known blogs, read reviews and explore several options before choosing a free public proxy server
• What Others Say. Reviews from other users are usually brutally honest and are helpful in determining the reliability and honesty of a proxy list
• Avoid Proxy “Times-Out.” Free public proxies often “time-out” because the proxy server may no longer exists or the server is taking too long to reply to a data request made from another device. Community blogs and comments should be able to help guide you away from untrustworthy public proxies

Although the majority of the experts in the technology population are leery of the security, dependability and reliability of public proxies, it is possible to find working pubic proxies that deliver quality service. It is rare to find websites that offer public proxies and are willing to test and check the proxy in real time and remove dead proxies have some consistency, so beware and cautious.

Researching a Proxy

Proxy identification is an important component of online fraud detection applications. If you are wary of public and/or free proxies, especially those from outside the United States then you are a wise consumer.

The majority of proxy lists on free public lists usually indicate the country of origin for proxies. This is relevant (and necessary) information to understand since you will often require proxies physically located in particular country. Usually, if the proxy is in the same country where you are working from, the proxy will be faster.

All the more reason to research and test the proxy before you begin using it and communicating you private information and data.

There are software programs available to check the speed of a proxy. The speed of a proxy server can vary by:

• The number of users currently employing that proxy (this happens primarily with free public, not private proxies)
• The location of the user and the proxy server. For example, a proxy which is fast for USA users may be slow for European users

Proxy Checkers

There are a few good proxy checkers out there that allow you to check hundreds of proxies per minute. Just like proxies themselves, beware if the software is free as it may allow access to unwanted eyes during your proxy checks.

ZennoProxyChecker has a built in program to check proxies against 20 parameters sorting out the most dangerous and selecting the best and fastest proxies.

Charon is another multipurpose proxy program. It searches Google for publicly posted proxy lists, and incorporates a checker to verify the anonymity and functionality of the proxies.

Another is ScrapeBox. Included in ScrapeBox are a powerful proxy harvester and tester. This handy proxy checker allows you to check if your proxies are working properly.

Since lists of proxy websites are published daily, it is virtually impossible to manually visit each site and test them. ScrapeBox’s Proxy Manager offers a far simpler solution. It has 22 proxy sources already built in, plus it allows you to add custom sources by adding the URL’s of any sites that publish proxies.

When you run the Proxy Harvester in ScrapeBox, it will visit each website and extract all the proxies from the pages and automatically remove the duplicate proxies that may be published on multiple web sites. So with one click you can pull in thousands of proxies from numerous websites.

Many websites publish daily lists of proxies. In a perfect world, you could manually visit these sites and copy the lists in to another tool and test them, then copy the list of working proxies to the tool you finally want to use them in. The ScrapeBox Proxy Manager is obviously a far, far simpler solution.

Next the ScrapeBox proxy tester can also run numerous checks on the proxies you scraped. There are options for removing or only keeping proxies with specific ports, keeping or removing proxies from specific countries and you can even test private proxies which require a username and password to authenticate. Finally, the proxy tester has the ability to test if proxies are working with Google by conducting a search query on Google and seeing if search results are returned. This way you can filter proxies for use when harvesting URL’s from Google.

Once the proxy testing is completed, ScrapeBox offers quite a few options, such as:

• Being able to retest failed proxies
• Retest any proxies not checked so you can stop and re-start where you left off at any time or you can highlight and retest specific proxies
• Test the proxies at set time intervals, then save the “good proxies” to file. This is a huge benefit since you will always have fresh proxies available
• Add keywords to filter out things like domains owned by competitors or large companies you do not wish to contact
• Sort proxies by all fields like IP address and port number
• Filter proxies by speed and keep only the fastest proxies
• Review proxies and keep only anonymous proxies or keep only Google passed proxies
• Classify the proxy sources, so when you test the proxies ScrapeBox can remember what proxies came from what source.

And best of all, when all the harvesting and categorizing is done, the proxies can be saved to a text file.

Next Step: Authenticating

For your proxies to work with URL Profiler, they will need to be authenticated. You can either authenticate via IP address or username and password. If your proxies are not authenticated, ScrapeBox will respond with a “failed” message for that specific proxy URL.

A key benefit to the ScrapeBox Proxy Harvester is that is has a “Trainable Proxy Scanner” feature. This means you can fully configure where you want to scrape proxies and meet any specific needs of your business.

Finally, after setting an anonymous proxy or high anonymous proxy for your browser, you can surf this page to test whether your real IP is hidden or whether the proxy you are using is anonymous: Proxy Checker.

Exporting Proxy Lists

Most proxy checker tools provide tutorials on their website or through You-Tube.

For example, ScrapeBox offers an addon called “Whois Scraper.” This tool is included free when you purchase ScrapeBox and allows for simple excel data export. It permits you to export all your “whois” data to an Excel .xlsx file. The exported information contains all the pertinent information you will need including:

• Domain Name
• Registration Date
• Expiry Date
• Registrant Nam
• Registrant Email
• Registrant Phone Number

To Sum It Up

Although there may be some advantages to Public Proxies, too often, the risks outweigh the benefits. The better option is a private proxy that is not accessible to anyone else and provides increase anonymity and security…two important aspects when using any type of server. Choosing an untrustworthy proxy site can lead to long-term problems which no one wants to willingly encounter.

The post Is It Possible to Find Reliable and Working Public Proxies? appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

So you just bought your first proxy. Maybe a batch of ten. You’re sitting there, reveling in the anticipatory anonymity that awaits you. After enabling the proxy you test a couple sites. I won’t say which sites, because they’re the kind of sites you specifically bought the proxy for, the kind you want to keep private, at least when it comes to personal use.

Yup, it’s working. Nobody knows where you are anymore.

But there’s a whole lot more to owning a proxy than simply browsing anonymously. You probably know that. In fact, that’s exactly why you’re here.

Below you’ll find 15 ways below to make money with proxies. A lot of the methods take time, dedication, and a decent amount of skill. Of course there are also quick tricks, software enabled schemes, and a host of lower-end crunching that all could yield in a few bucks.

But I’m going to throw a big fat disclaimer up front and repeat it a couple times throughout.

Proxies get a bad name. While some of the reputation is unjustified, a lot of it is completely true. Proxies can be used to thwart a great number of standard protocols on the internet. Many of these protocols are designed for fairness and legality, usually by major internet and governmental organizations, like the United States of America and Google. Proxies can be used to break laws, falsify reality, and intrude upon other people. The use of the proxy lies in the owner of that proxy — you.

With that said, here are 15 ways to make money with proxies, broken into three categories: ethical, questionable, and unethical. Claim each as you will, and be ready to face the consequences of your proxy use.

Ethical

These are the ones you want to focus on. Doing so will build your skills and reputation, and can yield some serious earnings. Keep in mind that many legitimate ways to make money with proxies will require many proxies.

1. Setting up a public proxy server with ads.

One of the most common ways to use a proxy is as an internet browser. You simply find a public proxy and search the internet through it so that your own IP address is hidden. This is the basic premise for proxy use on a personal level.

As a proxy owner, you can set it up so that your proxy is usable by the public. The best software for this is Glype, a web-based proxy script written in PHP that has free and paid models. For personal use its free, but if you’re looking to make some money with it there will be a licensing fee based on the number of users you expect.

You can use Glype to set up your proxy server for public use, and then enable ads on that server. If you get a high enough click-through on those ads, you’ll make money. This functions just like any other website that has ads enabled, but your site is offering the protection and functionality of a proxy for public use.

2. Using a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Tracker for Keyword positions and Google Rankings

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a staggeringly huge business these days. Everyone is dying for Page One rankings in Google and the scraping of keyword positions is the first step. Proxies are used in nearly every major scrape because no company or individual wants its IP address associated with so much data requesting, and a single IP address would get banned quickly.

If you private proxies and SEO skills you can retain those keyword positions and rankings. That information in and of itself is worth money, and you can start a business selling that information. Or you can crunch the data and sell the information along with your analysis. There are a number of successful services that already do this: Moz, RavenTools, and PageRank Checker are just a few.

On the flip side, if you have your own business you can cut out the middle-scraping-man and do keyword positioning and analysis yourself.

Either method will make you a lot of money in the long term, as long as you’re good at it.

3. ScrapeBox

I’m sticking ScrapeBox here, between SERP Trackers and Social Media Campaigns, because of its many, many features that relate to each of these. ScrapeBox is an application that you purchase once for $179. It only runs on Windows, and has a huge host of tools.

Some of the tools are SERP tracking tools. Keyword scraping is easy and simple with ScrapeBox. So is Search Engine harvesting, which finds URLs that have content similar to your search. You can compile all of this data easily and quickly. The Comment Poster feature in ScrapeBox allows you to automate comments on blogs, which can increase your engagement and page rank with embedded backlinks.

All of these can be tied together, too, making ScrapeBox a formidable tool. Of course, to do all this, you need proxies. This is not really a way to make money with your proxy directly. Instead, using your proxies with ScrapeBox will allow your website or business to greatly increase its viability in a crowded marketplace, which can make you a lot of money.

4. Running social media campaigns

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are no longer places to post your daily life; they are formidable business platforms. As such, it takes a good deal of work to successfully run a social media campaign. Simply “liking” (or “favoriting,” or “loving,” or whatever they’re calling it when you read this) is one level of engagement. Frequent posting on multiple channels, or even multiple accounts, is the next level of quickly growing a brand.

This is considered questionable by some, but if used to simply increase your follow, like, and post abilities, the proxy approach to social media is legitimate. There are two things to consider:

• Social sites like Facebook and Twitter don’t like too much activity from a single IP address.
• It takes too much time to follow, like, and post on multiple accounts for multiple companies.

Proxies and the right software will take care of both of these issues at once. Follow Liker is one of the best and most popular, as it allows customization of nearly every aspect of Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. For Follow Liker to do its thing — follow and like — it needs proxy servers.

The money-making comes into this in two ways. If you own a brand and need to do social media marketing, consider purchasing a proxy or two as a business expense. Over time you will save money because less personal time and effort will be put into your social media campaigns. You’ll yield higher results in the end, and your business will flourish.

The second method is to utilize multiple proxies for multiple brands, running a social media service for other companies. This is highly lucrative if you do it well.

5. Legal DDoS and Server Load Testers

See how the word “legal” is above this sentence? Distributed Denial of Service attacks are the most common way to shut down a website, and have been used by hacker groups like Anonymous to effectively take down government, corporate, and individual websites. As such, they are negatively associated in society. Used in this way they are illegal.

However, in order to build security into websites to prevent these sort of attacks, tests must be conducted. With a batch of proxies and certain coding abilities you can become a DDoS tester for companies, most of which pay to test their systems.

This is often done by large organizations, but there are many unprotected sites out there that need protecting. Use your skills for good here, rather than evil.

This also leads right into the next way to make money with a proxy…

6. Using a reverse proxy to set up SSL encryption

Reverse proxies are simply explained as protective measures, almost like blankets that help to soften the blow of internet traffic, requests, and attacks. In this particular method you can use a proxies to make Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption cheaper and easier for websites and clients. Every “safe” website must have a SSL Server Certificate to be considered safe, and each Certificate costs money.

Instead of the client purchasing a separate Certificate for each of their domains, you can use your proxy as the certified site, and each of their websites won’t need a separate one.

The downside to this is that each of those websites will have to share a DNS name or IP address. Unless you have multiple rotating IP addresses and a much larger network, in which case you’ve got a decent business on your hands.

7. Reverse proxy for caching static content

This is in the realm of the previous example, in that it requires a good deal of technical know-how and clients that depend on you. In this case those clients will be website owners that have a lot of high-quality images on their site, or anything that takes a long time to load. Using your reverse proxy you can store their static graphical content — images are the most common — so that when a user visits the website multiple times they won’t wait while all everything loads.

This can yield lots of cash, but requires a lot more than just owning a proxy. You’ll need mad coding skills to build a successful business that provides reverse proxy services.

Questionable

We’re now moving into the questionable realm of things. The methods listed here are generally not well-loved. They bend the rules and often detract value from others and specific services. All that said, they are powerful, and many people do them.

8. Selling YouTube Views

This is very popular use of proxies, and one that YouTube (and therefore Google) certainly does not allow. YouTube videos are ranked on a number of factors, but views are the most important. Remember Gangam Style, the most popular YouTube video ever? That’s what views can do for you, your brand, your whatever.

How many of those 2 billion views (and counting) were made by proxies?

You can use proxies and code to automate YouTube views. You do this by sending the proxy IP address to the YouTube video and telling it (through a program) to watch the video until it plays all the way through. Once this is done, make the proxy reload the website and watch it again. And again and again.

Of course this distorts reality. But will increase your video’s popularity. This will directly result in money if you get enough views, or you can use your proxies and code to sell this service to others. PHP Proxy is a common script that helps you do this.

9. Purchasing and Scalping Tickets

You can use proxies to queue up a popular concert and purchase large quantities of tickets. Let’s say you buy tickets for that group of 100+ friends you have … oh, right, nobody does that. You’ll probably be selling most of those tickets, and selling them at steeper prices than you paid.

This is distasteful and directly harms the live music industry. But scalpers are scalpers, and they have walked the earth for many moons.

A lot of higher end proxy providers actually have proxies meant for this purpose, specifically with tickets on Ticketmaster. This is a major concern for Ticketmaster, so the company continually updates batches of IP addresses that it has banned, making it an even more challenging and expensive endeavor.

10. Purchasing Limited Release Nikes

Did you know the selling of limited edition Nikes is a huge industry, just like scalping concert tickets? Now you do. Very similar to the above, this is a process that involves using proxies to make multiple clicks during a limited edition sale, which makes sure specific Nike models are placed in your cart (really in the proxy’s cart), which you can then sell at a much higher rate.

Again, Nike does not condone this, but it also treats the process as focus groups for future sales.

11. Providing Access for Coworkers or Classmates

If you’re really in this proxy game to make a quick buck, think on a smaller, more local scale. You could purchase a bundle of elite private proxies — say 20 — and let a few classmates or coworkers know you can get them secure, easy access to all those websites they can’t normally access.

I’m talking about sites like Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube. These are common time wasting sites that school and work environments specifically block, and you could reap a couple bucks per person per week — or day — depending on how greedy you are, and what people are willing to pay to slack off.

12. Using Previously Mentioned Tools to Sell Personal Data

We’re in a data collection world, so while this is probably not above board, it is done all the time by corporations and individuals alike. It also relates to many of the processes we have already explained. Software like ScrapeBox allows you to find more than keywords and URLs — you can get phone numbers, emails, and other social media account information.

Collecting massive amounts of this data, attaching it to keyword specific lists, and selling it to competing brands is one way to make money. Your proxies will be put to use to gain all that data. The selling part is what makes it questionable, because it really depends on what kind of data you’re selling.

Know that all major corporations are doing this in droves — data has become the ultimate worth in our internet society. Those companies are, for the most part, doing it with people’s consent. You, however…

Unethical

The final section. The few ways to make money off proxies that you really shouldn’t be engaging in. We’ll list them in a vague sort of way, because the specifics are up to you to pursue.

13. Email Marketing with Proxies

Much like the previous example, this consists of using a scraper or harvester to retain email addresses. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn — all of these sites have a host of personal email addresses visible to the public. A scraper can collect all of this information in a given keyword field and compile it neatly for you.

In the previous example, I said you could sell this information to different companies. What I’m talking about here is using those emails for your direct personal gain. Say, for instance, you emailed 10,000 people a proxy website of yours. In the email you changed the URL to an AdFly URL, which claims to give you money every time that URL is clicked.

You would basically be spamming individuals with strange links — exactly like all those phishing emails that end up in your spam filters.

14. Craigslist

This is worth a separate number because Craigslist is notoriously hard to scrape data from, and the company really doesn’t want you to do it. Then again, Craigslist is one of the most public and personal advertising spaces on the internet, so I understand why you’d want to try.

There are a number of tools and methods for scraping Craigslist, but the company has been known to send Cease and Desist letters to those that use its data for commercial purposes. So, yes, you can make money, but do it at your own risk.

15. CPA Falsification

This is the last dirty trick in the book, so I really can’t recommend doing this. You’ll most likely get caught, and it takes as much time as some of these other, more legitimate, methods. Cost Per Actions (CPA) is a marketing strategy in which advertises pay you for how many “actions” occur on an ad on your page. An action can constitute a click, website traffic, new subscription, or comments. The specifics are determined by the advertiser and your agreement.

In short, CPA falsification uses proxies to create countless fake actions or impressions on your own website, thereby tricking your advertiser into giving you money. If your batch of 10 proxies clicks on a Google AdSense ad 300 times a day for a month, you’ll see more cash because of it. Until Google finds out, of course.

In Proxy Summary

Do you feel better now that you know so many ways to make dough off that batch of proxies? While proxy servers are incredibly useful, it’s the tools used with them that will determine how you make money. In the end, time and dedication will get the best results, which is pretty much true of any endeavor in life.

The post 15+ Ways to Make Money with Proxies appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

If you’re in the market for proxies, you’ll find a number of private, shared, and public options available online. It can be difficult to wade through it all, even if you’re up to speed on the technical side of the process. One of the most well-known providers of private and shared proxies is SquidProxies. Below you’ll find a comprehensive review of the products SquidProxies offers.

Named after my favorite cephalopod, SquidProxies manages to have its many hands (they’re tentacles, really) embedded in the center of the proxy world. SquidProxies’ prevalence in the proxy world is due to many components, but the two highlights are top notch customer service and the most competitive prices in the market.

Before I get into the details of this review, I want to note that proxies can be used for many things. Some are nefarious, others completely legal. SquidProxies offers up its services in the legal domain, and states that right on its website: “We provide private proxies and shared proxies for just about any legal use.” The company will work with you on a variety of projects, but know that outright misuse of proxies will likely result in termination of your contract.

Price

We’ll start with what really matters. For the past five years SquidProxies has been the most competitive priced proxy provider in the market, at least when it comes to private and shared proxies.

If you’re unsure, “private proxies” mean those used solely by you. “Shared proxies” in this context means a proxy you pay for that is shared with other people. SquidProxies does not specifically state how many people you are sharing with, so while this is an interesting option, it’s not as useful (or safe) as a fully private proxy. Public proxies means free proxies, and these are riddled with thousands of users, frequent bans, and will likely scrape your data.

SquidProxies’ price tiers for private proxies range from $24 per month to $1500 per month depending on the number of proxies you need. The minimum order is 10 proxies per month, which should be enough for your basic needs. When it comes down it to it, $2.40 per private proxy is lower than most competitors in this small batch number, and makes SquidProxies a great choice for the budget conscious. And $.75 per proxy at the high end limit is ridiculously cheap.

The price tiers for shared proxies are technically cheaper — it’s $1.00 per proxy for the minimum purchase number — but you’ll need to buy 100 proxies per month, which means $100 per month. You can order in increasingly high ranges with shared proxies, but, as I said earlier, these will be shared with an unknown number of people, which will lead to slower internet speeds and more frequent IP bans. (And maybe insert the shared proxy price chat here.) 

Look around, you won’t find many cheaper proxy services out there. Some services offer different subscription models, and one has slightly cheaper rates. With SquidProxies the lowest batch of proxies you can purchase is 10, so for those that want one or two proxies use you will need a different provider.

Payment

SquidProxies takes most major forms of payment, including a host of your typical credit cards through 2CheckOut. Its preferred method is PayPal, and you will be prompted with PayPal logins to purchase your batch of proxies. This makes sense, because PayPal is often a direct payment and is one of the more verified services in the business.

For the tech entrenched, SquidProxies also takes Bitcoin. The website states that if you want to pay in Bitcoin you should send in a customer service ticket to make sure the team knows you are using that method.

When it comes to reviewing proxy companies one component is key: a quick delivery. SquidProxies is known for its almost immediate delivery of your proxies after purchase. Some companies require hours or days to verify, assemble your unique IPs, and send them over. SquidProxies often dials this down to minutes after you purchase.

The one minor flaw in the payment system is that canceling your account takes a bit of effort. You have to cancel with SquidProxies, and if you have recurring payments through 2CheckOut or PayPal, you’ll need to double check and make sure those are specifically stopped. SquidProxies has great service (which I’ll get into below), but this has caused a few users to be dissatisfied.

Speed

You’re beginning to think fondly of SquidProxies. The service is cost effective and takes Bitcoin! Speed won’t deter you, for the most part. SquidProxies states that it has “worldwide servers with 1,000+ Mbps dedicated speeds,” which should be plenty for most online activities. The proxy company also gives you unlimited bandwidth on your proxies, so you can use them for as much or little content at that speed.

Those “worldwide servers” are accurate as well, and viewable on a scalable world map. In the U.S. SquidProxies has 12 servers:

• Kirkland, WA
• San Jose, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• Anaheim, CA
• Henderson, NV
• Phoenix, AZ
• Cheyenne, WY
• Dallas, TX
• Chicago, IL
• Atlanta, GA
• Tampa, FL
• Madison, ME

This is great for users that need proxies with a U.S. IP address. For those that need one outside of the U.S., SquidProxies has 6 servers in as many countries:

• United Kingdom
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Romania
• Israel
• Estonia
• Sweden

I’m listing all of these because access to these servers will change your speed, depending on the country you are in. SquidProxies boasts on its home page that it’s the largest proxy network on the web, and this huge number of server locations lives up to that.

Where speed gets more complicated is in actual usage, as reviewers on sites like Black Hat World and Warrior Forum note. There have been a number of complaints over the years that SquidProxies IPs are slow or laggy. Most often, this is due to a misconfigured setup on the user’s end. SquidProxies has stellar customer service (details on this below), so if this is the case they should be able to help you out.

The other issue is just the nature of proxies. Putting a secondary point of contact between you and the internet is bound to reduce speed. But this shouldn’t factor for more than a second or two of load time. This is normal for nearly all proxies, and levels SquidProxies with its competitors.

Security

The whole point of using a proxy is to be anonymous and secure in your internet usage, so this is a pretty important factor. When it comes down to it, the elite and private SquidProxies offerings are just that: high quality and very secure. The proxies hide your IP address when used correctly, preventing other sites to see your data and location.

Many proxy services require you to use a username and password combination to access and enable your proxies. Not SquidProxies. The company has a IP-based authentication system. This means that once you have authorized your proxies, you can use them directly.

While this is a nice feature, there’s one loophole. In order to authorize your IPs you need to create a username and password with SquidProxies, then log into their dashboard. While you don’t technically need to enter your login information every time you use a SquidProxy IP, you’ll need to have one to set everything up, and to continue to log into that dashboard. Only 10 proxies can be authorized at a given time, so if you need to rotate proxies you’ll be logging in and out often.

When it comes down to it, SquidProxies has secure private proxies that will protect your identity. Its shared proxies are another matter. I won’t address them here, because it defeats the purpose if multiple customers are using a single IP.

Quality

Quality often refers to many different aspects when it comes to proxy providers. For this section of the review I’ll focus on the actual quality of your IP, and a few other quality-based services offered by SquidProxies.

IP Quality

The biggest concern with proxy providers is that they will sell you a “private” proxy, but actually rent that IP address to someone else, either at the same time as you, or sometime previous. This is a problem because IPs get blacklisted or banned from sites if used in certain ways, so if your IP addresses have been previously used, they might already contain some stigma from major companies.

SquidProxies claims that all of its proxies purchased on the private plan are, indeed, private. This has certainly been true for a long time, but there are comments out there, on sites like Black Hat World and Warrior Forum, that complain about proxies from SquidProxies not working, or being active when they shouldn’t be.

In my experience the quality of these proxies has been solid. They work most of the time, receive few errors, and seem (as far as I can tell) to be truly private. It’s a complicated proxy world, and you’ll never truly know what’s going on behind the scenes. But SquidProxies didn’t get to be the largest and cheapest network by hosting malfunctioning proxies to everyone.

Fresh and Non-Sequential IPs

To further improve the viability of their IPs, SquidProxies has two features that are robust when it comes to quality.

Non-sequential IPs

This means that if you purchase a batch of 50 proxies, they won’t come in numbered bunches that look similar. This will assure that when you start using those proxies, sites like Google and Facebook will be less likely to recognize all of your proxies as coming from one user, and therefore not send up any red flags.

Fresh IPs every month

This is a great feature that users love. Every month, upon request and just generally, SquidProxies will refresh all of your IPs. You can ask them not to do this, but for most users this is extremely helpful. It reduces the risk of your IPs getting flagged or banned, and increases your anonymity.

Social Media Sites

Quality of proxies is often linked with what services you can scrape and harvest data from. In the case of SquidProxies, you can perform these functions easily for many social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. This means that in general the IPs you are given will not cause a stir when used correctly for these sites, and the SquidProxies team will be able to troubleshoot your issues.

What you don’t see here is dedicated Ticketmaster, Nike, or Craigslist proxies. SquidProxies doesn’t claim services it can’t provide reliably, and if you need proxies for these sites look elsewhere.

All of this equates to high quality IPs.

But, for those that need more from their provider, we’ll get into the last and best section of SquidProxies.

Customer Service

It’s been said that to make a truly great company you need two things: a fantastic product and amazing customer service. Users want helpful, real people on the other end of a purchase. This is especially true with a proxy provider, especially when complications get highly technical.

Most excellent proxy providers have great customer service, and SquidProxies is among the best. The site has a ticket system in which you submit your issue, and fairly quickly a representative will contact you with specific help for your problem. SquidProxies states that their support hours run 7 days per week, 24 hours per day, excluding major U.S. holidays. And, when put to the test, the service is extremely helpful.

The only downside of this is that there’s no live support. But the SquidProxies customer service team usually gets back to users very quickly, so it’s not considered a major downfall.

Really, the whole business model is built around this customer service. All of your purchases on SquidProxies are subject to a 3-day money-back guarantee, and everywhere on the site you are encouraged to test their IP packages. They want you to purchase a small batch, run them through your programs, and make an informed decision about if their service will work for you.

This is paramount because proxies are complicated. There are so many applications of proxies that yours may not fit with their batch IPs, and that’s just fine. Test it out, ask your questions, and make an informed decision. The service team will be helpful and precise, so you should get exactly the high-end product you pay for.

Also, for individuals who need extra help setting everything up, the support is there. SquidProxies is great for beginners because of the customer support, and the low budget. All of this is coupled with an interactive admin panel, which makes for a seamless experience on all fronts.

SquidProxies Bottom Line

That’s a healthy dollop of verbiage on the merits and realities of SquidProxies. When it comes down to it the service is excellent, the price is low, and the applications are almost endless. Feel fine about jumping in, testing everything out, and making sure these proxies work for you. If not, keep hunting. But if they do, you may have found your proxy provider.

The post Our SquidProxies Review of Proxy Quality and Speed appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

The last thing you need when collecting large volumes of data from Google is an IP ban. The second-to-last thing you need is a captcha checking in on your human-ness. Each of these protection measures is employed by the search giant to weed out bots, which is exactly what you’re running if you’ve come to this article.

Before we get into the specific ways to prevent these terrible things, I’d like to address the ethical aspect of scraping Google. As a rule of thumb, yes, scraping Google is ethical. Harvesting data in and of itself is a common practice today, so much so that Google does it all the time, pulling the same sort of data you’re looking for from websites across the internet. Actually, it’s so out in the open that Google has a whole page on its Googlebot, the data scraping tool that crawls the web on Google’s behalf.

The discussion becomes possibly less ethical depending on what you plan to do with the scraped data. I’m not here to judge, so I won’t, but you should know that there a host of very legitimate and universally practiced functions that come from Google scraping, like competitive analysis, keyword crunching, and personal research. Flip the coin and you’ll find an equally large number of illegal functions, like DDoS attacks and unsolicited bulk email marketing.

The ethics of scraping Google’s treasure trove of data is in your hands.

You might also be wondering why Google has IP bans and captchas if so many scraping methods are technically legitimate. Put simply, Google wants humans using its site. Sort of like Terminator, the robots are inherent harbingers of possible death and destruction, and Google wants to safeguard websites on the internet from all those nefarious activities scraping allows. Individual humans can’t bring such evil things to the web, so Google is fine with them.

You can see this played out by the two levels of security your IPs will have to go through. Google doesn’t start off by banning your proxy IPs (unless you’ve done something very bad) — no, it starts by presenting a captcha. This is specifically designed to baffle bots. You’ve seen the captcha box before, and if you’re scraping you probably see it often. This is the first tier — the second is a ban, which can be permanent or impermanent, depending on your infraction.

The question remains: How do you get around those bans and captchas? We’ve got six methods, listed below.

1. Limit Individual Proxy IP Use

I’ll start with one of the more basic principles of web scraping etiquette. In most scenarios you or your company will be using large batches of proxies to do the data collecting. This is almost always the the case because the whole point is to scrape data in large amounts quickly, and you can’t do that very effectively if you only have 5 proxies.

As such, you’ll have a vast number of IPs to use when scraping data. In the software program you use to scrape (of which there are many, ScrapeBox is a good one), there will likely be a setting for how often a proxy can query or search. You’ll mostly likely find this in the API (application program interface).

The query frequency will be determined in seconds, or minutes if you’re wanting to be very cautious. I recommend, at the very least, setting an individual proxy IP to be used every 2-5 seconds, potentially more if you’re using combatant operators or keywords (which I’ll get into below).

Let’s say you set your search frequency to 5 seconds. This will make sure that a single IP address, a proxy you are using or rent, won’t make a specific query more often than every 5 seconds. This ties directly into that whole human concept. A real human wouldn’t likely query Google every second for 10 straight minutes. That would mean 600 individual Google searches you conducted, just for the fun of it.

No, that’s what robots do, and precisely what scraping looks like. Set your individual proxy IP query limit to every 2-5 seconds to be safe, or more second to be safer, and you’ll avoid bans and captchas for that specific IP.

2. Set a Proxy Rate Limit

This is pretty much the same concept as the previous example, with a slight twist. Whereas previously I advised to limit a single proxy IP from querying too often, you also want to limit how often all of your proxies start querying for a topic.

The range of time can really vary for this, and you can stagger your proxies to have different rate limits to even further reduce Google’s suspicions. For example, you want to beware of making 5,000 queries about “Social Media Likes” all at once. Even though these requests were sent by different, seemingly unconnected IP addresses, the fact that they have come together triggers Google’s ban and captcha procedures.

At the very least set your proxy rate limit to 1-2 seconds. To be foolproof about this, bump that up to 5 seconds for a third of your proxies, 2 seconds for a third, and 8 seconds for the final third. Doing this in combination with individual IP query limits will significantly reduce the risk of Google banning your proxies.

3. Set Your IP’s Location in Google 

Google has a bad habit of incorrectly deciding where your IP is located. It’s a bit of a joke, because IPs are often located in specific countries, like the U.S. or U.K., in order to access content and cloak the user in more of a mainstream appearance. When Google incorrectly determines your IP address it may feel like the whole purpose of your IP has deflated. Do not fear, there is a way!

The best way to remedy a Google geo-location redirection is to simply visit http://google.com/ncr, instead of your typical http://google.com. The “ncr” automatically sends you to the U.S. Google (which is the one most people are trying to access), regardless of where your IP is located.

When it comes to avoiding bans and captchas, the purpose of this step is to center your requests from a single country. As I previously mentioned, your proxy software is going to send out many requests to Google in order to search for information. If those similar searches come from fifteen different countries, all of which Google has incorrectly dropped you at, it will send up red flags.

Keep in mind that this really pertains to why you’re scraping data. If you want to scrape data on Japanese green tea harvesting blogs written by Japanese people in Japan, you’ll actually want Google to think you’re in Japan, like a normal Japanese human. Try to get a proxy provider with multiple world-wide locations for this, and if you’re unsure of an IP’s location, ask your provider or check for yourself.

If you want to search the most common market (a.k.a. the U.S.) use the “ncr” trick to make sure your crawlers start searching that version of Google.

4. Set Your Referrer URL 

This goes hand in hand with the last step because it’s about making sure you’re starting off your query on the right foot. In order to scrape Google you’ll need to access a specific part of Google. The most common searches with the biggest nets are often done on https://www.google.com/search, better known as the general search page of Google. This is where most of us type in whatever we want to know about. For those of us using Chrome, we simply type a phrase into the URL bar, and Google Search is employed to give us listings.

This is all how a human searches. Remember that the best way to avoid bans and captchas with Google is to act like a human. Most humans go to google.com to start their search, while Chrome users are automatically using google.com to search.

The issue with bot searches is that, if left alone, the bots will use your search operator or keyword to collect data without visiting google.com at all. They will simply reap from the wheat fields of Google Search as if nobody ever needed google.com for anything. Put in a different way, a robot bypasses actually visiting google.com because it isn’t necessary. A human wouldn’t do that.

The solution is to set your referrer to google.com specifically. Most software programs built for scraping have a specific part of the API that makes this possible. If yours doesn’t, consider using one that does. If you’re writing your own script, make sure to include this as a function.

5. Create Unique User Agents for your Proxies 

User agents are the technical term for identifying computer settings based on browser information. Not to be mistaken with actual identity, like your passwords or credit card information, user agents are common and there’s typically no real need to hide them.

However, when scraping Google for data, it’s paramount to diversify your user agent information. This principle comes back to the same old reason you need to change most of these settings — Google wants to believe a human is searching. Even if your IP addresses are different, your countries are lined up, you have unique keywords and operators, and the query times are set, if Google receives 10,000 requests in ten seconds, all of which have 1024 x 768 screen resolution, use the current version of Firefox, and run on Windows 7, it starts to get very suspicious.

Changing user agent information in your browser is simple, especially if you’re using Google Chrome or Firefox. You can do this by installing extensions that allow you to swap bits of user agent information for individual proxies, which will fool Google.

This can get complex and time consuming if you’re running hundreds (or thousands) of proxies, all of which need to have slight tweaks. Sometimes your proxy provider will include tools to do this in their API — Ghostproxies does, just ask. Make sure to contact the customer support department of your proxy provider if you’re worried about this step.

6. Avoid Google Search Operators That Raise Red Flags

This is a major one, and an offender that most people use when scraping data on Google. Search operators are terms used to conduct hyper specific queries in Google. When utilized effectively, they can result in a tremendous amount of highly relevant data for you to sort through.

The most common search operators you’ll see are:

• inurl
• intitle
• intext

Maybe you’ve used or seen each of those terms like this: “allinurl” and so forth. It’s basically directions for Google to sort types of content, which produces a more specific list of results for you and your bots. Search operators have a lot of rules and are used in a myriad of ways, but when comes to getting banned, they are very important.

Due to their popularity in bot searches, Google simply does not like them. Normal humans, the creatures you’re trying to emulate, do not go to google.com and type in “inurl: grasshoppers” to find websites about grasshoppers. They just type “grasshoppers.”

This is compounded (literally) when you and your bots run queries with multiple search operators. If we continue the above example, running this search — “intext: grasshopper evolution inurl:grasshoppers” — will get even more specific information, like websites with grasshoppers in the URL and text that refers to grasshopper evolution.

To Google, it becomes painfully obvious that you are not a human trying to write a biology paper on grasshoppers. You are, perhaps, a bot search run by a human trying to start their next niche website.

The number and types of search operators is massive, so first of all try to stay away from the common ones. Instead, string together multiple keywords for a more unique search, and refer to this list when looking for new ways to query. Also try to steer of clear of really common keywords in search operators because those have even more red flags around them.

Bans and Captchas Begone

Captchas will slow you down, which can be a detriment to the clients you have or the success of the project you’re working on. IP bans are a whole other headache, and will require you to reach out to your proxy provider. The six tips above will make it so you see fewer bans and captchas, which will increase your effectiveness and reliability in leaps and bounds.

With that said, the most important message I can impart when it comes to Google bans is to do research, and limit the robot-ness of your searches. Sometimes it’s better to walk slow and look like a human than push the envelope and scrape like a robot.

What is more sustainable in the long run?

The post Preventing Bans and Captchas When Scraping Google appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

Not all proxies are created equally. In fact, many proxies have varying levels of effectiveness in terms of speed, security, and routing protocols that make them quite different for users.

The two main types of proxies used today are Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) proxies and Secure Socket (SOCKS) proxies. I am going to break down the difference between these two methods on a number of levels. I’ll refrain from extreme technical language (except where necessary) so that beginners who come across this can understand just as well as a fluent programmer.

I’ll make comparisons on functionality, speed, security, cost, availability, and practical use. Before I dive into that, here’s a brief explanation of how the HTTP protocol functions in general, which both systems are built on.

HTTP Protocol

HTTP protocol is the standard proxy protocol for the internet. It’s what you see in every web address: http://www.example.com. It’s so ingrained in my modern-aged brain that in many ways I don’t see it anymore — except when writing an article about it, of course.

The first thing to know about HTTP protocol functionality is that it’s based on the client-server model in a request-response scenario. In most cases the “client” is a web browser (i.e. you, using a web browser), and the client sends out a request for information. This request for information is an HTTP request, typed in as Uniform Resource Locater (URL). The “server,” meanwhile, is an application or another computer with that information. Upon receiving the request, the server sends the resources, which is a myriad of content like images or blocks of text, in an HTTP format back to the client.

For those scratching their heads, the process above is what happens you go to a website. You are the client, typing in http://facebook.com, and Facebook (the company) has a server somewhere that holds the information you want to see. HTTP is the method by which the request is made, and then also how the information is provided to you.

This protocol is essentially how the internet and web-based browsing is set up.

Proxies come into play when you want another layer in this client-server model. One might want another layer for anonymity, or security, or because the client or the server has a firewall set up and they can’t get through to each other.

HTTP proxies and SOCKS proxies are two different types of layers. It gets a little confusing because “HTTP proxies” look very similar to “HTTP protocol.” While both types of proxies are both built on the HTTP protocol, they have some key differences.

HTTP Proxy Functionality

I’ll get into more specifics below, but the main standout feature for HTTP proxy functionality is that the they are built with the very specific HTTP protocol methods in mind. They are mainly used to fetch and receive within that protocol, rather than other types of network connections. This includes specific network ports, which all HTTP traffic is usually routed through.

Due to these factors, HTTP proxies are the more common of the two types, and are usually what people mean when they talk about proxy use. Public proxies, elite private proxies, and some VPN services all use HTTP proxies.

SOCKS Proxy Functionality

SOCKS proxies operate at what’s called a “lower level” than the HTTP proxy. This means the SOCKS proxies are more general, have more applications, and are not as smart. “Smart” in this sense has to do with programming and proxy methods understanding information that is passed, which I’ll talk about in the security section. Programmers also use the SOCKS proxies because, unlike the HTTP proxies which are tied into the HTTP protocol, SOCKS can work on any network protocol and on any port.

Due to this general use application of SOCKS proxies, they are used more often for non-specific HTTP protocol related matters, and are malleable to programmers in a way that HTTP proxies are not.

Security Comparison

What most people talk about when they talk about the difference between SOCKS and HTTP proxies is how secure, or not, the two are. Proxies tend to be used specifically for anonymity and security, so it makes a lot of sense that this is the primary concern people have. I’ll break down how the two compare below.

HTTP Proxy Security

In general, HTTP proxies are not as secure as SOCKS. That’s true if you’re using an elite private proxy, a shared private proxy, or a public proxy (listed in descending order of safety).

The main reason HTTP proxies aren’t as secure? They are “smart.” It’s weird, I know. Usually intelligence implies a higher degree of safety, but in this particular protocol chain that’s just not true.

The security issue comes into focus when looking at the actual network traffic or data that passes between the client and server in the HTTP protocol. Due to this intelligence — which is really a simple way of saying how the proxy and protocol system is set up architecturally — the HTTP proxies can understand and interpret this traffic.

This means that the stream of data you, the client, are requesting can be seen by the proxy you are using. That means it might “see” the latest episode of Game of Thrones you downloaded, which is illegal to own without purchasing. It might also “see” a casual web search on woodpeckers. The proxy does not care how sensitive or not the data is, but the fact remains that it can read it.

This has led to a number of proxy provider scandals. For instance, popular VPN site HideMyAss! went on record as logging the data of a paying user who happened to be using its anonymity to help access and steal Sony information. The user’s actions were illegal, and HideMyAss! had every legal right to cough up the information.

That information could never have been tracked if HideMyAss! was built on a SOCKS proxies platform, rather than with HTTP proxies. In this particular case, the user was at fault. However, many users believe that HTTP proxies are highly secure — given names like “elite private proxy” — when in reality the companies that own them could be logging said data.

HTTP Proxy Caveat

There is a digital caveat to this whole notion that HTTP proxies are not secure. Many of us are now familiar with HTTPS instead of HTTP — the “S” is commonly associated with a more secure website. In Google Chrome a small padlock icon appears on websites that have https:// at the beginning, rather than http://. This is possible through the CONNECT method, which allows an HTTP proxy to establish a secure and direct connection between client and server, also known as a tunnel.

If you’re looking at buying HTTP proxies, ask the provider if they support the CONNECT method. If they do, you can get great security out of certain connections. If not, you run the risk of your data being read.

SOCKS Proxy Security

As you can probably guess, SOCKS proxies are more secure than HTTP proxies. The main reason this is true is because SOCKS cannot read the data being passed between client and server. It is dumb, in a sense, and that ignorance makes it none the wiser to whatever information happens to be passing between the client and server.

The technical process behind this has to do with the SOCKS proxy method of connection, which is called tunneling. With an HTTP proxy, the client and server exchange information through the proxy itself, which stands as a middle man between the two web-based interfaces. With SOCKS tunneling, the client makes a direct request to the client, and with express permission (called a handshake) the tunnel is opened.

This is a TCP/IP-based connection, and it is extremely secure because of its directness and sheer transparency. It is clear when the tunnel is open, and it is clear that the SOCKS proxy cannot access the data in the tunnel.

SOCKS proxies have two main versions, 4 and 5. The most recent version, SOCKS5, adds even more support for security and UDP. For the basic user, either version of SOCKS will work well, and both are very secure.

For reference, Tor, the ultra-anonymous and secure site, is built on SOCKS proxy technology.

Speed Comparison

When it comes to proxies, the next thing people are concerned with is speed. Having a middle-man route all traffic to and from your IP address is a great way to get bogged down, so speed is always a question. I’ll compare HTTP and SOCKS proxy speed below.

HTTP Proxy Speed

HTTP proxies are the definition of a middle-man, so you’re sure to come up against at least a slight drop in speed. With that said, HTTP proxies are the more common of the two types, so speed is an issue much addressed by providers.

There are three general types of HTTP proxies, and they each have different speeds:

• Public proxies. These are free proxies found on proxy lists, and are terribly slow. Thousands of people could be trying to use a single proxy, and all that data tends to cut down on speed. Also, these proxies are not secure, so I don’t recommend using them.
• Shared private proxies. Not every proxy provider has this option, but SquidProxies, one of the most popular providers, has them. You have to pay for these and they are typically shared between a few number of customers. You get cheaper access to a semi-private proxy in this way, and can theoretically use the full speed of a private proxy, which hovers around the advertised 1,000 mb/s. However, your proxy-sharing mates might be bandwidth hogs, so your speeds could decrease seriously.
• Elite private proxies. These are the cream of the crop when it comes to HTTP proxies, and often have advertised speeds of more than 1,000 mb/s. Individuals don’t typically have data connections that can handle those speeds, which means an elite private proxy should not slow down your speeds at all. However, proxies are proxies, and if there’s any issues with the middle-man, you’ll notice the speed shift.

There is an exception to this rule, and it has to do with HTTP proxy caching. Some higher-end proxies have the ability to cache content before you see it, which will make browsing much more fluid. Content like images, videos, and GIFs may actually appear faster than without a proxy because of this ability.

SOCKS Proxy Speed

When it comes down to it, SOCKS proxies are still proxies, and don’t function that much faster or slower than HTTP proxies. The speed will ultimately result in your proxy provider’s settings, which, as I said above, can be upwards of 1,000 mb/s, or much slower than that.

From a computational standpoint, SOCKS proxies require less coding to run. This can increase speed in some cases, but most people won’t notice the shift.

The one aspect where SOCKS proxy speed is much higher is when downloading or transferring a large amount of content. Due to the direct tunnel of the SOCKS proxy, this content can be transferred more quickly. It is the preferred proxy type for BitTorrent because of this.

Price Comparison

This, much like speeds, depends significantly on your proxy provider. Even costs for HTTP proxies can vary widely, and there are a huge number of providers out there. Some are excellent and well-respected, others are not. Do your research when seeking out a proxy provider. Search forums like Black Hat World and Warrior Forum, and contact customer support if you’re unsure.

Some proxy providers will include both HTTP proxies and SOCKS proxies (usually SOCKS5) in their packages. Those that do, like TorGuard, tend to be a little more expensive than your typical HTTP proxy provider.

You can check what types providers offer before you purchase, either through customer service or in the FAQ section of their website. Very few services provide just SOCKS proxies. Typically services will include both.

This makes SOCKS proxies a bit more expensive, because if you don’t need them, you can purchase a cheaper plan from just HTTP proxy providers.

Bottom Line

Hopefully you have a much better understanding of the difference between HTTP and SOCKS proxies now. As I said earlier, I did my best not to get into the super technical language that goes along with these differences. That technical stuff does exist, though, and you can search the Wikipedia pages linked above at your leisure, or ask pertinent questions on Black Hat World.

Each proxy type has a use, so when choosing one consider what specifically you’ll be using it for, then make your decision.

The post What is the Difference Between HTTP and SOCKS Proxies? appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

IP addresses are often metaphorically described as addresses in the real world; a unique IP is akin to a specific house found on Google Maps. Unlike actual physical addresses, there are millions of IP addresses, and thousands of new ones are generated every day. Most of these IP addresses are actually proxies, which is what you’ve come here to explore.

If I were to continue this house metaphor, a bulk scanner is to proxies as the Google Street View Car is to homes. Someone, or something, goes around and checks in on addresses to make sure they exist, operate, and what sort of condition they’re in.

What kind of scanner are you? The proxy scanning community can be split up into a few categories:

1. Bulk Scanners

This is by far the biggest share of users, and most likely the category you fall under. I say that because you’re here, at an article that includes “how to bulk scan” in the title.

These users want to bulk scan and test proxies, often massive lists of free proxies, to see if they work. They also want to know their ports and speed, how blocked or blacklisted those proxies are at a variety of sites, and where they’re located.

The free proxies are available through a number of different online sources. You can usually find massive proxy lists assembled by VPN providers, individuals in the community, and other interested parties. However, these free proxies become defunct or blacklisted very quickly. New, updated lists are often updated on a daily basis. Thus the need to scan them.

2. Private IP Testers

Many people in the proxy world don’t use free proxies, they buy them in bulk. For the most part these paid proxies are high-quality and don’t have issues. However, if you purchase, say, 1,000 proxies at a time and use them heavily, you might find certain IPs blocked by certain sites over time.

A bulk scan and test comes in handy so the renters of said proxies can get a grip on which proxies are malfunctioning. A good proxy provider will also be able to do this, and should provide you with a new proxy immediately, assuming you didn’t abuse the one that’s broken.

3. Professional Scanners

There’s money to be made in everything these days, and that includes proxy scanning. Companies or employed individuals scan proxies in much the same way they scrape data — after all, proxies, their ports and speed and location, are just another type of data. These lists can be sold privately as well as posted for public use.

Professional scanners can also be system or network administrators who use scanning methods to monitor host or service uptime and service upgrade schedules. Another huge part of professional scanning lies in assessing the security risks of a network, which is basically fake-hacking your own network to further improve its security.

You might actually be a bulk scanner on their way to becoming a professional scanner. That’s just fine. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Disclaimers

Before we get into the actual applications that will help you to bulk scan proxies, I need to point out a few pertinent disclaimers. The proxy world can be a dangerous one, and as such any legitimate article on them needs to be upfront about the legal and illegal issues.

Proxies are often negatively associated in media because they are used by covert hacking groups to steal and crunch massive amounts of data. Also, free proxies tend to be an open can of worms. Many companies only make them free to scrape your data or identity, which can be used in a myriad of negative ways.

In short, a lot of illegal actions can be performed with proxies.

On the bulk scanning front you don’t have quite as much to worry about. Typically, as a proxy scanner, you are just looking for proxies that work. What you decide to do with the proxies that work is up to you — but know what is legal and what isn’t.

The one aspect of proxy scanning that can get tricky is dealing with your Internet Service Provider (ISP). If you’re scanning a huge number of proxies and ports, your ISP is likely to have an issue. This is partly because scanning for so many proxies and ports is often coupled with harmful behavior (like a DDoS attack), but it’s also a serious drain on ISP services. Many ISPs today offer high data speeds, but most users don’t actually use those resources to the fullest. If you run a massive proxy scan, you’re likely to tie up your ISP in a way it’s not going to be happy about.

With that out of the way, we can continue to the different applications that will help you to bulk scan proxies.

Proxy Scanning Applications

For the most part, you will need to download application software to do bulk proxy scans. There are some browser-based services that allow you to scan for single proxies at a time, like Proxy Checker, but this is not at all practical for bulk measures.

Luckily, we live in a world that supports open source creation. This can be especially true in the facets of the technology industry, and shines in the proxy bulk scan area.

NMap (“Network Mapper”) – Free

NMap was originally founded in 1997, and stands as the longest running free resource for proxy scanning methods. You can download the NMap software, which comes in a command line format (also called NMap), or a GUI interface format called ZenMap. Installation instructions are available for both of these versions, and the NMap suite runs on Windows and any Linux based platforms.

To put it shortly, NMap is not only a robust tool for scanning proxies, it has a dedicated community of users and builders that consistently improve on its methods. The service was originally created for the professional scanning community — those network admins detailed above — and is still primarily used for that purpose.

The NMap software supports a number of proxy identifiers, including:

• Host discovery. This is your basic proxy scan that checks to see if an IP is “alive” or “dead” (if it will respond or not).
• Port scanning. You can find which ports are open on certain IP addresses.
• Version and OS detection. This is a sophisticated tool that can show you what application is being used on a proxy, and what OS the proxy is running on.

These are the basic uses of NMap, but, as the site notes, with a high level of technical expertise the options are pretty endless. NMap defaults to SYN proxy scanning, which is the most common and fastest type of scan, but it has a huge list of other methods if SYN will not work, or is not the scan type you want to use.

Angry IP Scanner – Free

Another free proxy scanner, Angry IP Scanner (also known as ipscan) is also open source and works across multiple platforms. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Angry IP is more of a specifically designed tool for the general bulk proxy scanner, though it has professional applications as well. The service has reached over 18 million downloads to date.

Angry IP Scanner can scan proxies in any IP range and with any port, and doesn’t actually require an installation, but is rather a downloadable program you can use immediately. It’s fast and effective for most proxy scanning needs, and uses a separate thread for every IP address scanned.

Angry IP Scanner supports a number of proxy identifiers, including:

• IP addresses and ports, whether or not they are active.
• Can get hostnames and MAC address.
• NetBIOS information, including computer name, workgroup name, and logged in Windows user
• You can set a favorite range of IP addresses in the software
• Web server detection
• Results can be saved in a number of file types, including CSV, TXT, XML or IP-Port.

Also, because Angry IP Scanner is open source, a number of plugins have been developed for it that greatly increase the information you can gather. If you know how to write Java code you can writ your own plugin, too.

Yet Another Proxy Hunter (YAPH) – Free

As the name implies, this is just another ol’ proxy hunter. “Proxy hunter” has been the name of many original free proxy scanners, and YAPH is the most current version.

YAPH is a lot more specific than the previous two examples — it only scans public proxies that are SOCKS4, SOCKS5, or HTTP proxies with CONNECT enabled. In short, YAPH can only scan and ping proxies that can be tunneled. This has its benefits if you’re looking to make a direct connection with proxies, but it’s also normally a way to get in trouble.

To help avoid that trouble, YAPH works in conjunction with both NMaps’s decoy system and ProxyChains‘s stealth system in order to not get caught. I’m not going to give any more details than that.

If you are curious, check out the Github documentation on YAPH, and use at your own risk.

ProxyFire – Free

ProxyFire is (yet) another free proxy scanner. It is downloadable as the ProxyFire Master Suite Free, and has many abilities that make it a viable software application for bulk scanners. It uses the SYN scanning method.

ProxyFire supports a huge amount of very specific proxy settings and identifiers, including:

• SSL/Https, SMTP/EMail, Gateway, Socks4/5, Dangerous IP Test
• Scan for Port, Country, dangerous IP, Duplicate Filter
• Planetlab/CoDeeN proxies Filter
• RBL, hostname Filter
• Different type of forums leeching(support LOGIN)
• Non-forum proxy sites
• Different search engines leeching
• IP to Country lookup
• Leech proxies from FILE, URL, FTP, EMAIL(pop3)
• Proxies port connecting Test
• SSL/HTTPS URLs

The free version allows a max thread check of 1,000, and a max search thread of 5. The paid version is the ProxyFire Master Suite Professional, and costs $89 USD. It includes technical support and updates for a year in addition to a higher range of maximum threads.

Paid Proxy Scan Applications

We can include the paid version of ProxyFire in this list, though I won’t enumerate its abilities again. In general, with so many free proxy scan applications there isn’t a huge need to pay for one. However, I will list one application below.

ScrapeBox

Maybe you’ve heard of ScrapeBox, maybe not. It’s sort of a proxy paradise tool in that it can do most of the things you’ll want to do with proxies. Not only is it a data scraping machine, but the dedicated Proxy Harvester in ScrapeBox makes it easy to search large batches of proxies in small amounts of time.

The full list of ScrapeBox Proxy Harvester features include:

• Multi-Threaded Connections
• Filter by Country
• Filter by Port
• Filter by Speed
• Add Custom Sources
• Classify Sources
• Custom Testing URL
• Auto Save
• Automator Support

ScrapeBox has a one time fee of $150, but if you visit Scrapebox.com/bhw, you can get it for a discounted price. The benefits of ScrapeBox are that the information displayed is well organized and easy to manage, and it includes a host of other tools that will take your proxies farther than the other applications listed here.

The Actual How To

So far I’ve explained the purpose of proxy scanners, the warnings that go along with them, and a number of premium tools to help you do the scanning. I’m aware that the actual how to of proxy scanning may not be clear as of yet.

The reality is that each program is slightly different. In general, you will want to start by finding a free public proxy list that has been updated recently. You can search for these on Google. Remember, because you are doing your own scan of the proxies, you’ll weed out the ones that don’t work. Some of the tools above also have options to find safe public proxies, but that’s another subject entirely.

After finding your list, copy and paste them into the application software window that accepts proxies. Depending on the tool it might ask for a file import — if this is the case, make sure to download your free proxy list as a file type that is accepted by the application.

After doing this you’ll see that huge list in the window of your proxy scanner. Depending on the list and your tool’s options, you can then set a number of parameters, like what port to scan, number of parallels sockets, and how long the connection timeout should be. Here’s a good guide for that with ProxyFire.

After that, simply click the “scan” button. Depending on your search list and internet connection speed, you should have a list of checked proxies in a few minutes. Now you’ve got to decide what to do with them!

The post How to Bulk Scan and Test Proxies for Ports and Speed appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

It’s no secret that social media is one of the premier avenues for growing a brand today. While Twitter and Facebook are the two juggernauts in the field, Instagram has grown to unforeseen heights when it comes to simplicity and effectiveness. Twitter is saturated and Facebook is complicated. Instagram, however, is a clear, crisp, rewards-based platform that is easy to use for most people.

Easy to use is all relative, of course. For a single account and a couple posts a day, it takes almost no time. Spending ten minutes before bed scrolling and liking and commenting — “networking” as they say — can be done with a little more dedication.

When you decide you want to run a marketing campaign with Instagram, that time multiples in magnitudes. Growing a single account organically, which means an actual person liking, commenting, and following, can be a full time job. Now let’s say you’re a social media manager, and have 10 Instagram accounts to run. What about 50? 100?

To Bot, or Not?

That sort management requires an office full of hardworking individuals, or a bot. There, I’ve said it, the dreaded word. A bot, in this sense, is a program that goes around doing the liking, commenting, and following for you under a specified set of parameters. Bots are generally disliked among social media communities because they take the actual person out of the social networking. They are also against the Terms of Use for most social networks.

Yet bots exist, because nobody can manage hundreds or thousands of Instagram accounts by themselves, even with a large team. That’s just one social network, too. Bots also exist because individuals want to grow their personal or business accounts at seemingly astronomical speeds. This will result in a better looking profile, which results in more overall traffic, which, depending on your business model, could mean cash. Lots of cash.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that bots are not only frowned upon, but have a habit of getting Instagram accounts banned. This happens when brute tactics are used by the bot owner. Over-liking or following will result in a red flag, and Instagram can (and most certainly will) ban the account.

You don’t want that. A good solution? A sophisticated bot that can emulate human interaction to keep you under the radar while also doing super-human social media.

Enter IgersLike.

IgersLike Overview

While the social media companies don’t allow them, bots aren’t all bad. The key is to remember that you’re emulating human behavior, so limit your bot from stepping over the line.

IgersLike is a self described “social media management tool” that will help you manage your accounts, automate tasks, target audiences, and provide analytics to understand what is working. All these things are possible, and a lot of it is done with bots and proxies, which I’ll get into below.

First, some basic facts on IgersLike:

• The service is created and run by a guy from Portugal, who can be reached via Skype ID IgersLike or through the website contact form.
• The service gained popularity on Black Hat World.
• The service is legitimate in terms of what is offered. It is not a scam, but there’s a chance your accounts can get banned if you don’t use it correctly.
• At the time of writing, IgersLike is invite only. You can contact the company directly to try to get around this, or find somebody using the service to send you an invite. Black Hat World is a good place to ask for an invite.
• Due to the invite only policy (and lack of information), the actual costs of IgersLike are not readily available.

How to Use IgersLike

When it comes to actually using IgersLike there are different levels of complexity. I’ll start with the basics.

Initially, know that IgersLike is sold as a SaaS (software-as-service) in a web browser format. No downloads, installation, or programs are required. Everything you do in IgersLike will be accessed via the website portal, which makes for a seamless, hassle-free experience. The best part of this is that you can use IgersLike on any device in any location — whether it’s your personal computer or a library machine. You don’t have to worry about unsafe downloads or outdated versions.

Once you’ve received an invite and created an account you can log into this interface. You’ll see a number of options, including tools to add Instagram accounts, add proxies, purchase proxies, and create Instagram accounts. Everything will be in a clickable menu on the left, with the main working screen to the right.

I won’t go into every aspect of IgersLike functionality, but these are the most useful and straightforward ways to bulk manage your Instagram accounts.

Adding Your Instagram Account

This is the most essential aspect of IgersLike — you will need an Instagram account to use the service. Under the Instagram Bot tab go to Accounts, and you will be prompted with a screen with instructions to add your Instagram account. This is essentially linking your Instagram with IgersLike so that IgersLike can post, like, and follow on your behalf.

To do this you’ll need your Instagram username, the password for the account, and what proxy you want to use.

IgersLike functions on proxies to do its bot-tastic work, and in this section you’ll have the option of choosing between “Your Proxies” and “System Free Proxies”. Unless you have loaded your own private proxies into the system (I’ll discuss this below), you’ll only have Free options. It’s best to use your own paid, private proxies. These will be fast and secure. However, many people use the System Free Proxies, and the fact that IgersLike has an active list is one of its best qualities. If you pick a Free proxy, you’ll get to see how many other accounts are using that proxy.

The availability of these free proxies will change all the time, so you’ll have to update settings frequently.

After entering all this information you can log into your Instagram account through IgersLike.

Adding a Recipe

After you’ve logged in, you’ll want to start by adding a Recipe. This is the basic way to use IgersLike, and a good place to start for beginners.

The Recipe function can be found under the Instagram Bot tab, and essentially allows you to create specific actions for any number of Instagram accounts you own. The Recipe is broken into three methods of social networking:

1. Hashtags: On Instagram, hashtags are used heavily as a searchable identifier. IgersLike Recipes allow you to like, comment, and follow based on hashtags. You simply enter the hashtags you want the recipe to include as they pertain to your Instagram’s niche — be it urban shoe fashion or pruning roses, or anything in between.
2. Comments: With IgersLike, you can create custom comments in Recipes. Depending on the Task (which we’ll get into below), these comments will be typed on other Instagram account posts, creating a dialogue between your account their account. Follow the instructions on IgersLike to create comments correctly, because if you don’t your account will certainly get banned by Instagram.
3. Users: IgersLike allows you to target individual users in addition to hashtags. You can collect user ID numbers in a number of ways (I’ll get into that below), and this is where you paste those IDs.

You can create multiple Recipes, and you can utilize a single Recipe for multiple Instagram accounts. This sort of versatility allows you to target very specific niches on Instagram while saving you heaps of time.

Creating a Task

After logging into your Instagram account and creating a Recipe, a Task will need to be performed. Tasks are how the bot actually runs. It is the action you take, and running the Task is the equivalent of liking, following, and commenting on other profiles on Instagram.

You do this by clicking “Start New Task” on the account you want to run. This screen will have a number of instructions and options. The instructions remind you that IgersLike will run 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and to plan your tasks accordingly.

It is very important to stress at this point that overuse of a single Task, Recipe, or Proxy IP address on a single Instagram account can and probably will result in an account ban.

To avoid this, set the Instagram bot’s task parameters to long wait times between actions. In the Task field you’ll be able to select which Tasks you want the bot to execute. You can select multiple Tasks here, and the options are huge. Likes, follows, and comments are all possible, all on a single account, followers of an account, hashtags, etc.

I recommend performing single tasks at a time, and not stressing any factors that might get your account banned. IgersLike provides very helpful time suggestions, and I recommend spacing out your Tasks even more than they suggest, and ending that task within a week so it doesn’t get suspicious.

I also want to note that this “Task” process can get complicated and huge, so test it out. After entering your initial task, click “Run Task” and wait a few seconds. Shortly you’ll see that your linked Instagram account went around liking, following, or commenting (whatever you wanted it to do) based on the parameters in your Recipe.

This is the core of how the IgersLike Instagram bot works. You just saved yourself hours of work, week after week.

Next Level IgersLike

Above are the basics of IgersLike’s Instagram bot application and techniques. Using just that you can save yourself time and automate a couple accounts easily. That’s all well and good, but this is a serious tool made for serious purposes. Below you’ll find some of the more comprehensive services IgersLike provides.

Group Accounts and Tasks

As I’ve said, you can login multiple Instagram accounts with IgersLike. While you could create Recipes and Tasks for each individual account, you can also combine them all into one easy to manage Group. This works best for Instagram accounts that have a similar theme, like fashion, backpacking, digital art.

Let’s say you have 10 Instagram accounts that focus on different types of digital art. After linking them all with IgersLike, create a Group Account and add each one of these to this group.

In the Group Account settings you’ll see options that make it so these multiple accounts can like, comment, or follow the same people on Instagram. As IgersLike recommends, you do not want to do this. If you comment on the same accounts with ten of your accounts all within a second or two, even once, Instagram will likely notice and boom, all of your accounts will be banned. Make sure the setting is checked so that different people are liked, commented upon, and followed.

Once you’ve added the Group Account, you can create a Task that every account in the Group will run. This, again, cuts down on time.

Instagram Toolkit Scrapper

It’s unclear if “Scrapper” is really meant to be “Scraper” — English is not IgersLike’s strong suit. It doesn’t really matter, because the toolkit part of IgersLike is very helpful in targeting a large batch of people for your bot to interact with on Instagram.

The “Scrapper” essentially lets you grab massive amounts of user data almost immediately, which you can then plug into your Recipes to more expertly execute your Tasks. The Scrapper works by using a single Instagram User ID (an actual number, which is can be found with this tool or on Instagram) to find hundreds of other User IDs.

As an example, if you want to follow, comment, and like some (or all) of National Geographic’s Instagram followers, this tool will spoon-feed you the User IDs of those followers in batches of 200. You then copy and paste these IDs and place them in your Recipe and then, when you run your Task, you will like, follow, and comment on these people.

It’s an advanced way to target specific user accounts, which will help grow your brand in your niche.

IgersLike Proxies

This isn’t another method, but rather a bit of information on the proxy system used by IgersLike. As I said above, you have to use proxies to link your Instagram account to IgersLike. The free ones are easy enough to use, but you’ll have to change them frequently, and other users will put stress on them.

For the dedicated, get private proxies to do this work. You can buy them through IgersLike at around $4 per proxy per month, which is pricey. You can also buy them through a third-party, like our proxy service. If you do this, and your third-party uses username and password protection, you’ll have to ask the proxy provider to authorize IgersLike from its end. You can’t do it through the IgersLike API.

You’ll also want to make sure your private proxies are rotated monthly, as this will help reduce the chance of your accounts or proxies getting flagged or banned.

IgersLike Extra Services

In terms of automating your Instagram accounts, the above will get you very far. IgersLike goes beyond this in many ways, offering custom campaigns, analytics tools, and in-house proxies that you can buy. While each of these has its merits, many people use IgersLike simply for the automation. If you’re interested in those advanced services, contact IgersLike on Skype or through the website.

In Summation

IgersLike will take your Instagram accounts to the next social networking level. It will do this through bot use, administered and monitored by you. Use this service cautiously. Do small trial and error experiments with fake accounts at first, because you don’t want to get a beloved account banned.

However, to do any of this, you’ll need to get an invitation. Good luck!

The post How to Use Igerslike to Bulk Manage Instagram Accounts appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

Netflix and YouTube are two of the largest media streaming services on the planet. If you want to watch a superhero movie, a detective show, or a ridiculous cat video, it’s most likely going to be on one of these two platforms. That’s all fine and good for people who live in high-access countries like the United States, where both of these companies were founded and operate.

It turns out a lot of people don’t live in the U.S. Sort of surprising, right? With billions of people populating earth it stands to reason that a country with under 400 million individuals isn’t the only place where people want to watch things.

The issue, which I’m sure you know because you clicked on this article, is that YouTube and Netflix have a nasty habit of blocking access to certain content based on your geo-location. As such, the inevitable question arises: How do I stream Netflix and YouTube from my country, or any country?

It’s a valid question. While many people are trying to get access to U.S. content, the restricted access is a two-way street. There are plenty of shows on Netflix available to U.K. subscribers, or India subscribers, that U.S. audiences can’t see. For YouTube, there are countless rules and regulations, all of which keep content locked in certain geographic boxes.

This doesn’t work for you and I. We’re living with a free data mentality, and with technology it is possible to stream all this content from anywhere. The answer? Proxies.

How to Stream Netflix from Any Country with Proxies

I’ll start with Netflix, and I’ll start the Netflix section with a couple disclaimers:

• Even if you are able to get Netflix streaming in multiple countries, you will still need to pay for the service. Using a proxy and enabling unrestricted access to content will do nothing for you if you don’t have a subscription.
• As of January 2016, Netflix has decided to throw down against geo-location piracy. The company is constantly updating its lists of banned IPs, which means the services I list below may or may not work at the time you are reading about them. I’ll do my best to be clear about a software’s abilities, but know that Netflix is currently adamant in its decision to stop geo-location tactics.
• Despite being against these proxy methods of streaming, Netflix has also stated that its intent is to offer all of its titles to all of its subscribers. It currently cannot do that due to the media producer’s competitive streaming rights clauses, which basically means Hollywood and crew want exclusivity and money from Netflix. Regardless, the stated hope is for unlimited access of its streaming titles across the world, so in a couple years (hopefully?) the first half of this article will be useless!

Now that I’ve got those out of the way, let’s talk about the different proxy methods you can use to stream Netflix as if you are in any country.

VPN Services

VPN, or Virtual Private Networks, are one of the most common proxy methods out there for privacy and streaming content. In short, a VPN service uses its own IP address (of which it has many) instead of yours, white simultaneously making your IP address private. Many people seek these services out due to their simplicity and privacy buffer, which makes sure your individual IP is not affiliated with the websites you visit.

It also means that the location of the VPN IP address is what sites see as your IP address, so if you want to stream U.S. Netflix content, you just need a VPN with an IP address in the U.S. Then, voila, you are “in” the U.S., and can watch House of Cards without issue.

Due to their prevalence, VPNs are also the first tier of services targeted by Netflix, and many of their IPs have been banned in large batches. You’ll know this when you turn on your VPN, queue up a video, and see the “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy” error message. In the war of streaming, it’s a matter of who can update its database faster — Netflix, or the VPNs?

If you’re set on using a VPN, the best method is to do your research and find services that currently work. Also, be willing to change often. Yes, it’s a hassle, but that’s the life of a proxy-streamer. With that said, here are four VPNs that seem to be working currently. All of them are paid, and all are expressly secure.

• ExpressVPN
• VyperVPN
• BaronVPN
• TunnelBear

Note that there are countless VPN providers. The three above are included because of their current good standing, their excellence in terms of security, and their ability to stream Netflix among other sites.

Many VPNs are free, which comes with a host of problems. When looking for a VPN to join it’s important to note what countries they have IP addresses in and how responsive their customer service is, as these will be the two primary factors that matter in a private, secure service.

Many VPNs are no longer advertising Netflix-specific streaming, because those that do are getting shut down by Netflix. Consider contacting customer support or looking through forums to see if the VPN you are considering works for Netflix. At the very least, many of these have a free month or three-day trial — you can use that to test for yourself.

Smart DNS

Smart DNS is another method of using proxies to watch Netflix from any country. The main difference between it and VPN services is that Smart DNS switches your IP address only at the moment when a company, like Netflix, is looking up what country you’re in. A VPN transmits your data continuously, and for all of your internet traffic. The Smart DNS knows which moments it needs to be used.

Smart DNS, when working, is a lot quicker than VPNs because it doesn’t require any encryption. This means better buffering and higher-quality streaming, all perfect for media junkies. However, it is not a replacement for a VPN and those concerned with privacy — so keep that in mind when deciding which platform to pursue.

This method has been more effective since Netflix’s overhaul of the geo-restriction issue, mostly because the majority of offenders were using VPNs. As time goes on these Smart DNS services may also suffer, so continue to do research on the most recent and best services available.

Here are three services that have worked well:

• Smartflix: Named and built specifically to replicate the Netflix experience, Smartflix is one the leaders in Smart DNS manipulation of geo-restriction. After a 7-day trial it’ll cost you $3.99 USD a month, which must be paid on top of an already existing Netflix account. Smartflix has been hit hard by Netflix’s efforts, but after some workarounds seems to currently function as it was intended.
• Getflix: Getflix is Australian company that has actually taken the Netflix banner off its official list of media streaming services, though we are pretty sure it still works for the site. Getflix functions as a Smart DNS with VPN qualities, and offers its platform for a range of other networks, like Hulu and HBO Go. A monthly subscription is $3.95 USD, with cheaper tiers if you pay for multiple months or years at a time. For paying customers Getflix also comes with a VPN.
• Unlocator: This service, as far as I know, works for Netflix. Similar to the previous two, it hides your IP address when a geo-location request is made, and points instead to an IP address in the country of your choosing. To get Unlocator working you just have to change your network settings on your device or router. After the 7-Day free trial it’s $4.95 per month, with cheaper options for longer subscriptions.

As I said earlier, do some research to see if these services are working as you want them to be.

Classic Private Proxies

While VPNs and Smart DNS are all about convenience, there’s an arguably simpler solution. When I say simpler I’m not talking about technology. I’m talking about the headache that comes with using popular services to thwart massive companies like Netflix. Assuming Netflix continues in its persecution geo-location hopping, all the services above could, at some point, be out of luck.

This is where where your classic private proxy service comes in handy. For those unaware, there are plenty of services that will take your money for a batch of proxies. While the rates for 1-3 proxies tends to be similar to the cost of a VPN or Smart DNS service, the larger batches cost a good deal more. The beauty of the service is that it provides you with unique IPs that are entirely your own to use.

This is what many people use for complete privacy and security on the Internet. If you use them correctly, you can also stream Netflix from a variety of locations. To do this, just sign up with a proxy provider that has servers in different countries. Reach out to their customer service if you’re not sure what countries they might work in, and once you know, buy a batch.

Ask which proxies are specific to certain countries, and use those as your proxy server when streaming Netflix. This sort of approach is much less likely to be thwarted by Netflix because, try as they might, the company can’t ban every IP address on the Internet. Most of these IPs are used for a huge range of activity, and Netflix won’t know how to go about banning every one of them. The best part? Most private proxy providers are willing to change your IPs every month or so, so even if Netflix were to ban yours, you could request new ones.

Find a company that works for your needs, and use it to stream to your heart’s content. You likely won’t be able to access every countries’ Netflix with this method, but you should get a lot more than you did before, and almost definitely U.S. and U.K. access.

How to Watch YouTube Videos from any Country Without Location Restrictions

Well, that was a long section on Netflix. The good news is that at the time of writing YouTube has much fewer measures in place to make out-of-country streaming difficult for users. This means you’ll encounter many less roadblocks, and probably won’t need to switch your method very often.

The better news is that nearly all the methods mentioned above work equally well for YouTube. This lies in the nature of the work-around — namely, swapping your actual IP address with a different IP address. These exact principles are needed when getting out of a YouTube location restriction, so for those who want a completely free streaming web experience, continue seeking out VPNs or private proxies.

Some More VPNs

We didn’t list these above because they no longer work for Netflix, but they function perfectly for getting access to YouTube, and they happen to be very user friendly.

• Hola: This is the most-used VPN out there. That’s because the base model is free. While this will provide you with YouTube access, note that Hola was part of a semi-scandal in which it was selling user bandwidth to other companies and individuals, and then using that bandwidth to perform DDoS attacks. In the world of free proxies, your data will be used or scraped in some way. Proceed with caution.
• HideMyAss!: This is a paid VPN that is incredibly popular. It will definitely work for YouTube, and has tons of country options to choose from.
• ProxMate: This is one of the cheapest paid models out there, and functions as a browser extension proxy. It should get you access to YouTube geo-location restricted channels.
• FoxyProxy: This could really be in the Netflix category, too, because as far as I can tell it works for Netflix. It’s here because FoxyProxy offers a couple different services. The basic, free model is a Chrome or Firefox browser extension that changes your geo-location and provides an alternate IP address for you. These are free, though…so user beware. FoxyProxy also offers a paid VPN, which is expensive, and used by clients around the world. It also has a great name.

Other Methods

One of biggest differences between the Netflix geo-location battle and the YouTube one is that YouTube does not always tell you what country you need to be in to access said blocked content. Granted, Netflix doesn’t show you what you can’t have, but there are ample lists of what content is available elsewhere. YouTube is just too big to list all the videos in all the regions successfully.

This lack of knowing which country will work makes the VPN method less than ideal, simply because you’ll be switching your country frequently to find the right one, just for one video. That’s time consuming.

Here are some other, potentially quicker methods for getting around the YouTube geo-location issue:

• UnblockYouTube: For those that just want to watch a video here and there, use this service. You copy and paste the URL you can’t watch into the bar on UnblockYouTube and in seconds a new page will pop up and you’ll be able to watch just fine.
• ClipConverter: This resource converts the unwatchable video into a downloadable movie, which you can download and watch on your computer. While I don’t personally download files from strange websites, this is used by a lot of people without too much issue. You will want to know how to deal with strange spammy messages that appear during or after your download, and probably have an anti-virus platform engaged when using ClipConverter, just to be safe.

In Conclusion

When it comes to bypassing geo-location restrictions on Netflix and YouTube, this should serve as an excellent primer. I hope everything works, especially in the face of internet privacy clamping down from a variety of angles. If you can’t find anything — really, something above should work — your best friend is a Google search. Likewise, sites like Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and TorrentFreak are good places to do research. Reddit, in all things, but especially tech-related things, can be instrumental when it comes to relevant query based research.

Good luck, and keep streaming!

The post Using Proxies to Stream Netflix and YouTube From Any Country appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

The answer to the very general question of “how many proxies do I need for my application” is exactly what you thought it would be: it depends. This is actually the answer for most proxy related questions because proxies are, inherently, a situation-based concept. Many people don’t use proxies, know what they are, or have any idea how much of the world is run by them.

That’s not your situation, clearly. If you’re pondering proxies for applications the number will entirely depend on your situation, what the application is, what you’re using the application for, and how much you’re willing to risk.

Let’s dig in!

More Is Better

There are a couple key factors when considering the number of proxies you need to successfully run an application, but one mentality trumps all of them. More is always better when it comes to proxies.

Why? Well, the main reason you need proxies in the first place is to successfully hide your anonymity. While hiding your individual browsing habits is simple, and could probably be done with a single proxy if necessary (or a VPN), most people are trying to do much more than that. Most people are trying to scrape data, automate social media, and create defensive mechanisms on the internet.

In performing these more complex tasks you will always run up against the risk that are inherent in proxy use. One risk is that your proxies will be blacklisted or banned, and therefore you’ll need new ones. Or, worse than that, your proxies will somehow be traced back to you, and your actual IP address will be blacklisted or banned. This second scenario doesn’t happen very often, but very well could if you’re not safe.

The best method against both of those scenarios? Purchase or find a massive amount of proxies and use them for everything. The more the better, because the more proxies you’re using the more your applications can run without stopping, and the safer you as an individual are.

Paid Proxies for Applications

There are limits to the “more is better” reality, and bulk purchasing proxies just to protect yourself is not an economic move. I’ll discuss free proxies below, but in this section I’ll cover how many paid proxies you need for a number of scenarios and applications.

As I wrote earlier, it all depends. If you want to simply browse the web under a different IP address, try to find 1-3 proxies to do this. You won’t even need an application — in most cases you simply plug the proxy IP address and login information into a web browser or computer system settings. The internet will think you’re somewhere else, and you’ll be free to browse anonymously.

For those looking to use proxies in a more calculated way, like scraping Google or purchasing limited edition Nikes, paid proxies are the only way to go. You can do both of these things with free public proxies, but the private proxies will be faster and more reliable.

There are two types of paid proxies you can use: elite private proxies and shared proxies.

Elite Private Proxies

The most helpful advice when it comes to purchasing elite private proxies is to buy 10 and try them out. Many people recommend 10 private proxies for a basic load of scraping or occasional product purchases. Granted, these 10 proxies need to be absolutely private (not used by anyone else).

Also, check with your proxy provider to see if the proxies delivered are virgin proxies. Virgin proxies are brand new and, most importantly, unseen by Google and other IP banners. This is an important point, as a virgin proxy will be much less likely to get banned than one that has been used before. More than that, if a single IP has been banned before, it will be banned quicker and longer every concurrent time. It’s alright if you don’t have virgin proxies, but it would be best if you did.

After trying out your 10 proxies in various applications, sort through the results. Were they fast? Did they time out? Did they get banned? The best part about purchasing paid proxies is that you can usually request new proxies from your provider at no cost. Don’t abuse this policy, though — a provider will likely drop you if you burn through your 10 proxies every 30 minutes and request new ones.

You can get a batch of 10 for relatively cheap, too, often for under $30 per month. If your scraping or reselling of high-end items outweighs that monthly investment, you’re all set.

Shared Private Proxies

Shared is the middle ground between free and private. Some people would never use them, but for a number of applications they work excellently. Basically, a shared proxy is one you have to pay for that other people are also using. How many other people is up to the provider, but as long as the proxy has decent upload and download speeds, it’s not a huge issue. The hope is that those other users don’t get your shared proxies banned, but it’s hard to trust other anonymous proxy users you’ve never interacted with.

The positive of the shared proxy is how cheap it is compared to elite private proxies. You can get a single shared proxy down to under a dollar per month, but you typically have to buy them in large batches.

If you’re going the shared proxy route, I recommend purchasing 100-150 proxies. The spike in numbers is due to the unknown quality of who you’re sharing the proxy with and how much data they are using. If there are five people on a proxy all using it 24/7 to capture large packets of data, the connection will be slow. Therefore you’ll need a lot of proxies to get the same sort of speeds as a private proxy. Also, shared proxies are more likely to be banned due to their overuse, so having a large batch of them will make sure you have backups.

Don’t Overwork Your Proxies

The two numbers mentioned above — 10 elite private proxies or 100-150 shared proxies — are base numbers for you to experiment with. Those numbers could be enough for your purposes, but only if you stick to cautious and reasonable methods.

Interval Spacing

Most applications have a myriad of options and settings that limit the frequency individual proxies are used. These are very important.

In a specific application, like ScrapeBox, it’s easy to dial in how many seconds you want in between individual pings for a single proxy. Doing this is highly recommended in general, and necessary if you have a small number of proxies. Again, the number depends greatly on your specific use-case, but generally speaking a 10-14 second delay is standard and cautious.

Every time you use a proxy it increases its presence on the web, and if you’re not careful you will get it flagged by overuse. If you really don’t want that to happen, set the intervals to a minute or more. This way you can run them literally all day and night, every day and night, and not worry about your proxy getting banned.

Threads and Connections

Setting the intervals of pings is one measure to take — another one is to get a handle on your threads and connections. A thread or connection is how many channels you actually have transmitting information. The proxy is just an IP address that’s trying to connect to other IP addresses. The thread is the passage through which that information travels, and is typically determined by your ISP or proxy provider. Check with both of these to determine how many threads you have access to so you don’t upset them.

Threads and connections are also usually configurable in the API of popular applications, like ScrapeBox or GSA. The Unofficial ScrapeBox FAQ — which is a helpful resource in its own right — recommends having at least 20-30 proxies for every connection you open. Again, this will change based on your specific situation, but a single connection will also work for 10 proxies.

However, I’ll also point out that this is another place to be cautious. Many people keep the thread to proxy ratio 1:1. If every proxy has its own thread it will look much more like a normal user, rather than a proxy scraping for data. This may seem like overkill to some, but it will help to assure your proxies don’t get banned.

A good example of where the 1:1 ratio is important is if you’re using proxies with emails and email accounts. Email marketing by spambot with proxies is not legal (so don’t do), but you can still use them to open email accounts and click on links in a legal way. Doing this will put you up against Google’s bot detection methods. You’ll want a 1:1 ratio here, because not only will your IP addresses come from datacenters, they’ll be using email in a non-human way.

Free Proxies for Applications

Everything I’ve discussed above relates to paid proxies. When you’re paying for a service you don’t want to abuse it, so there are rules to follow. Free proxies are another story altogether. In most cases I do not recommend free proxies. They are terrible for simple web browsing because they’ll likely snatch your data. They will not work for specific purchase schemes like limited Nikes or Ticketmaster, as they’ll already be banned from those sites. They are slow, burn out quickly, and need to be updated frequently.

Despite all that, you will use them. I get it—dropping cash on proxies might not be viable. If you’re just starting out it’s a no-brainer to use free proxies, or at least try them to understand the process. Once you start turning a revenue paid proxies are the way to go.

There is one excellent application for free proxies: bulk web scraping. If you need to scrape data from a huge number of sources and aren’t too concerned with accuracy or 100% completion rates, use free proxies. You can get massive lists of free proxies from various sources, like Black Hat World, then get ScrapeBox and run checks on all the proxies to see which ones still work. Do this daily and you’ll build a collection of free proxies that will work for a little while.

Take the working proxies and run some bulk web scraping tools with them. You can set your ping frequency to a reasonable amount, but there’s not as much need to worry when it comes to free proxies. They will eventually be banned, either through your own use or someone else. Put each of those parameters as high as they’ll go (as long as you still get somewhat of a return rate), and see what happens.

Don’t set your thread count too high, though, as this has will negatively affect your ISP, and you won’t want them to know you’re bulk harvesting with free proxies on their service.

In Summary

Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how many proxies you’ll need. More is always better, but there are plenty of ways to make use of a small batch of paid proxies. For individual applications like ScrapeBox and GSA, there are often forums and help centers to give you advice on the more technical or specific parameters. Get your first batch, set the limits, and see what happens.

The post How Many Proxies Do I Need for My Application? appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

Proxies are used for an awful lot of things. Illegal, legal, grey areas — you name it, proxies will be there. They’re a constant middle man to the portals of the web and a bouncer at your front door. I enjoy thinking of them in this animated way; it gives a relatively benign entity some character and makes it easier to imagine the hard work they do (or are programmed to do).

One of the many uses of proxies is the scraping of data. Proxies are effectively used as in-betweeners and workhorses so that you, the scraper, don’t get in trouble or have to stay up all night, every night in order to get your data. The data in question can take any number of forms. Testing proxy ports and speed is one type of data (and one that uses proxies to find proxies), while amassing domain names is another type of data.

The data I’ll address today is the Whois domain data of a website.

What is Whois Domain Data

You might need a refresher on what exactly Whois Domain data is; don’t worry, it’s not very complicated. Every single website in the world is registered and paid for by somebody. These websites are more officially known as “domains”, and are called by specific “domain names”. The registration process requires individuals or companies (whoever owns the website) to list contact information for their domain.

Often the contact information is a name, an email address, a phone number, and a physical address. It’s a bit like signing up for a credit card, except there’s no credit check.

The Whois Domain Data is the technical term for all of that information. In your quest for building a website and purchasing a domain, I’m sure you were asked at some point if you’d like to pay for Domain Privacy Protection. This is often offered by your web host or domain host and will make sure the Whois data (name, email address, phone number, and physical address) is not associated with you at all. Purchasing a Privacy Protection plan should cost around $1 per month, and is a good idea if you don’t want your information out in the public.

Finding Whois Domain Data

Having explained how to hide your information, know that the rest of this article will be dedicated to actually finding the people who haven’t put Privacy Protection on their domains. I will explain how to find Whois domain data in a simple way, and then how to do it with proxies.

ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) is the official place where all names and numbers are stored when it comes to websites. It is impartial, separate from any government, and holds a very large amount of data and power today.

ICANN is also the first real source for a Whois lookup. Any individual can go on the website, type in a domain, and find the information associated with that domain. If the information is private, it will either list nothing, or will list a generic corporation that is hosting that information. If it’s public, you’ll probably find a name and address of a very real person.

GoDaddy has a version of this Whois lookup as well. While both sites (and many others) are great for looking at a single point of data, they aren’t much help if you want to pull reams of data.

Scraping for Whois Data

Scraping is the term used when pulling large (like, really huge) amounts of data from the internet. You can scrape all manner of data, but in this case you’d like to scrape Whois Data. ICANN won’t help you, nor will GoDaddy.

Before I get into the applications that will allow you to scrape in bulk amounts, it would be helpful to talk about the purpose of such scraping. There are a couple use-cases for scraping WhoIs Domain Data:

1. Cold-calling new domains with business services.

This is probably the most common reason to scrape Whois data. In fact, I just registered a new URL and have yet to protect its public information. I woke up to a dozen emails, all of which stated that my website could grow in leaps and bounds if I used the development services offered by this person, or this corporation. I bet you’ve received some of these. Or, maybe more likely, you are one of the people sending these emails.

When your information is public, it is simply public. People can and will find it, then try to contact you. Some of these cold calls (or icy cold emails) might result in a new business venture, but are often viewed as spam.

One thing to note at this juncture: If somebody replies that they are “opting out” of being contacted in this way, you must comply. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has made it very clear that business emails in which services are offered or conducted can be opted out of by anyone that does not want them. You can read more about the Act for the full details, but know that a single instance (a.k.a. a single email) that violates the Act could cost you $16,000.

2. Finding companies in your niche market.

The last example focused on offering your services to every business on the public domain block. This one is more about finesse. Let’s say you’ve started a small niche blog or company with a specific product. You’re beginning to connect with brands and influences, maybe write for their websites. Doing the research for this can take a lot of time.

A WhoIs Domain scrape, when used correctly, can give you the email addresses or phone numbers of people who own domains related to your business. This is more of a collaborative contact, rather than a sales pitch.

3. Assembling a database of Whois information.

This step is frowned upon, so I won’t go into too much detail. Assembling large lists of “free” information that includes the personal details of domain registrants is technically legal because the information is just out there. However selling those lists is a legal and moral grey area, but people do it.

Proxies and Scraping

The applications below work best with proxies, as does any retrieval of large reams of data. Proxies work best for two reasons:

• They provide you anonymity, so any questionable activities can’t be traced back to you.
• They harness the incredible power and speed of bots.

Those two factors are at the core of why anyone uses proxies for anything, but specifically why they’re great for scraping data. In general, scraping large amounts of data is not looked upon fondly by the internet community. As such, proxies give you privacy and anonymity to act as you will. Be cautious with this, and don’t pursue super illegal activities. You’ve probably heard that before.

The second step is speed, and that’s where these applications come in. There are countless applications out there that increase the ease at which you can scrape data as a whole, and Whois data specifically. Plenty of coders can write individual scripts to do this effectively, and if you want something like that you should visit Black Hat World to find that person.

However, there are a couple larger, more legitimate software applications that have Whois scraping built in.

ScrapeBox

ScrapeBox is software I will mention again and again. It is sort of the ultimate reigning king of the scraping world. This is the case because it’s a one-time purchase fee, there are dozens of free plugins, there are lots of tutorials for how to use ScrapeBox, and the app is coded to work well for your needs.

The Whois scraping part of ScrapeBox is actually a plugin. Once you purchase the software (a necessary step you’re going to have to take in most cases, unless you program the script yourself), open ScrapeBox and look in the AddOns drop-down menu. In there you will find the “ScrapeBox Whois Scraper.” Click Add, wait for it to install, then head back to the AddOns drop-down and you’ll see the Whois Scraper there.

Click that and a new window will pop up — this is portal for finding Whois domain data. You can load domains from the ScrapeBox harvester (which is the main thing ScrapeBox is used for), or you can load them from a file.

It’s important to note here that you will need a list of domains to scrape. There are countless ways to do this that I won’t get into. One of the simplest is using another Add-on in ScrapeBox: the Domain Availability Checker. This allows you to look up domains based on keywords, which are either taken or not taken, and you can use this to generate a list of already registered domains in your niche whose Whois data you want to scrape. There are other ways to do this as well.

Let’s assume you have a nice long list of domains you want to get the Whois Data for. Paste in the URLs and click “Start.” The application will run and, in a short time (depending on how many domains you entered), you’ll have a list of Whois Data for every single domain.

You can export this information in a number of ways. You can include all the information provided, just the names, just the emails, just the phone numbers, etc., and in doing so assemble a list of contact information from every domain you scraped. While this will work for a lot of domains, many will be protected. There’s no real way to crack the privacy of these, as people pay for services that are meant to keep them private.

ScrapeBox will cost you $97, but you can usually find a discount online.

Atomic Whois Explorer

Atomic Whois Explorer, made by AtomPark Software, is another Whois scraping tool. This one is not rolled into the ScrapeBox suite, so may work better for people who want a standalone scraper or want to pay less. That said, Atomic Whois Explorer has many of the same functions as ScrapeBox. You can run a multithreaded search, filter your results, and download the information in a number of file types.

The Atomic Whois Explorer works with all kinds of domain names too — not just .com or .org. This is useful because new domain types are popping up all the time, and if you really want to get the full scope of Whois data, you’ll need to scrape a lot more than the common ones.

ScrapeBox has this capacity too, and its AddOn actually lets you add your own domain types, if any are missing.

The Atomic Whois Explorer is $49.85, and you can trial the software for free.

Proxy Purpose and Type

You can run a Whois scrape on either of these applications with your regular IP address. You don’t need proxies to do this in small doses, just like you don’t need a proxy to search a single site’s Whois data on ICAAN.

However, there are limits. If you use your single IP address your searches can be tracked back to you. You most likely don’t want that. You can also piss off your ISP quickly, because it’s clear what kind of data you’re bringing in through their services.

Proxies come in handy here (as they always do), to increase capacity and anonymity. Buying batches of proxies and plugging them into ScrapeBox will take the Whois Data scrape from 5 results in 20 seconds to 10,000 results in under a minute. It’s really not comparable; if you’re going for high volume Whois data scraping, you will need proxies.

The amount is up to you, but the fewer you get the more sensitive your settings should be in the applications. Don’t ping too often, make sure to rotate and rest proxies, and open only a few threads. This is true for all proxy use, so apply this methodology to everything you do.

One unique aspect of scraping Whois domain data is that it only works with SOCKS proxies. If you’re not sure if the proxies you have (or are about to buy) are SOCKS, ask the provider. Plugging regular HTTP proxies into either ScrapeBox or Atomic Whois Explorer will not work.

In Summary

You should now know nearly everything you need to scrape Whois data successfully. Think hard about the reason you’re doing it, and try not to be a bulk email spammer. That’s no fun; you don’t want those emails, so dishing them out isn’t very kind.

That said, using proxies to effectively get contacts in your niche is perfectly legitimate, and cuts down on all those late-night hours when you would scour the internet. Assemble your email lists efficiently and get your work done fast.

The post Using Proxies to Scrape Whois Domain Data appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

To use instant setup proxies or not? That is the question Shakespeare couldn’t have imagined would come to wrack the late-night tech-junkie more than anything. I get it. You need proxies. You think you need them now. There they are, offered as “instant,” a PayPal (or Bitcoin) purchase away. That immediacy feels like a birthright in our crazy fast-paced world, and you’re close to pulling the trigger.

You probably found this article in a last-minute attempt to assure yourself that yes, purchasing this huge batch of instant setup proxies is the right thing to do. I’m not going to tell you not to do it. Instead, I’m going to lay out in even and non-emotional terms the pros and cons of using such instant services (I know how emotional this can be). This means I’ll also be touching on the other kinds of proxies, those bought and waited for, so that you can make an informed decision.

Sound good? Good.

The Purpose of Your Proxies

This article comes down to the question of purpose. What exactly are you using your proxies for? That answer is inherently the key to what kind of proxies you need. There are three big categories when it comes to buying proxies from a provider:

• Fast: These are your instant setup proxies.
• Cheap: These proxies won’t break the bank, but they may break in a bunch of other ways. They probably won’t be particularly instant in your setup, either.
• Quality: The deluxe proxy boasts high data speeds, specificity to your needs, and a number of other redeeming qualities. It won’t be instant setup, though, and it’ll only be cheap if you’re lucky.

It’s possible to get two of those traits when purchasing a batch of proxies, but all three is not very likely. You will pay a price for everything. Think about the purpose of your proxy purchase overall, and of your immediate needs.

If a report is due tomorrow and you need to scrape massive reams of data overnight with the hopes of a quick compiling in the morning, then your purpose is fast setup time. Grab the instant proxies—you do need them now, and you’ll sleep better knowing they’re running. If you’re buying proxies for scraping applications and will need them to last over the next days, weeks, and even months, do you really need instant setup proxies? Probably not.

The reality is that you’re talking about the difference between 0-5 seconds versus 12-72 hours to receive your proxies. Some services can take longer, but not for the common user. If you’re a company that’s purchasing in the thousands for very specific purposes, you’ll need to wait, but I doubt that’s who’s reading this right now.

So, seconds verse hours. Not weeks or months. Can you wait?

What is an Instant Setup Proxy

I want to be clear about the terms here. An instant setup proxy provider is one that, upon receiving your payment, sends you your proxies immediately. Not within minutes or hours, but now. These systems tend to be fully automated; after you create an account and enter payment, the system will dispatch the amount of proxies you purchased to you via email.

How do the providers do this? Proxy providers like this own large pools of proxies, stored in data centers around the world, that are just waiting for paying customers. When you make the purchase an algorithm locates the proxies that best fits your order and dispatches them to you ASAP.

It’s as simple as that, and sounds good in many ways. We’re living in a digital world, and this particular topic is at the center of that digital-ness. Why not automate the process?

The Pro

The main pro we’ve already mentioned, and it’s obvious. Speed. You get those proxies immediately and they can be used immediately. It’s hard to beat product that is readily available in such an easily accessible way.

The Cons

There was only one major pro because, when it comes down to it, there are a lot more cons with instant setup proxies.

1. Not Specific To Your Needs

Due to the automated nature of the service, you often don’t get proxies that are specific to your needs. As you may know, proxies are used for all sorts of things. Some people want proxies to scrape and harvest data from Google, others want them to create and access email accounts. Still others need proxies to make Ticketmaster and limited-edition Nike purchases, while even more people want them to just browse the internet anonymously.

The above list can continue ad infinitum, but the point is that the particular ways a proxy is used requires a specific kind of proxy. Most of the time a general proxy will work, but it won’t work well.

Let’s take the Ticketmaster example, as that typically involves a time-limit. You need proxies to purchase hard-to-get tickets. You forgot about the sale date (let’s say it’s Coachella tickets), and the tickets go live in one hour. You scramble for proxies that will activate in that amount of time and find a service that can do it. You purchase them only to find that many of the IPs have already been used and banned by Ticketmaster. These weren’t virgin proxies (ones that have never been used or seen before); they had digital stigma attached to them. Your ticket-grabbing application fails to work because the proxies get burned out and you don’t get the tickets.

This is a worst-case scenario, but my point is that with automated instant setup proxies you can’t really know how they’re going to work. They will work; you paid for them, but most of time people don’t just need proxies to work, they need them to work for a specific application or process.

2. Rarely Virgin Proxies

The second major negative for instant setup proxies relates to an aspect of the first example. You might never be able to get virgin proxies. This will depend on the provider, but most of the time instant proxy providers source from a continuous, huge pool. This pool has been shared and used by hundreds if not thousands of customers who did all sorts of things with these proxies, making them unusable in certain situations.

Like I said, this will depend on the actual proxy provider. My advice would be to get in contact with customer support and ask if any of the proxies are virgin proxies, how you can get your hands on those, and what sort of use the other ones have been through. This will probably cut into your immediacy factor, but you never know. The customer service might be immediate too, and all your problems will be resolved.

Virgin proxies are not necessary, but very helpful for specific proxy uses.

3. Higher Cost

This, again, will depend on the proxy provider you end up choosing. The cost range for proxies on the internet is massive—proxies can run you as low as $10 per month for a single proxy, or many more proxies for $20-ish a month. Cost has to do with other factors, too. Are the proxies shared or private? Are they HTTP and SOCKS compatible, or just HTTP? How often do you get a refresh of proxies? Does the service have an integrated API to manage the proxies, or a VPN service alongside the proxies?

It’s a lot to research, which is something you should consider when purchasing proxies in general.

The point here is that typically instant setup proxies cost more than they should. The proxies provided are not worth the high cost, you just end up paying for the immediate service. For a little more patience (and more research) you could find proxies that will last longer, run faster, and be more in-tune with your actual needs.

4. Fewer Providers

There are tons of proxy providers out there, but there aren’t many instant setup proxies. This requires a business to own thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of proxies already, so that when a customer buys they are ready to go. That kind of overhead is expensive, so only a few services provide actually instant proxies. InstantProxies and ProxyBonanza are two of the more well-known ones.

This smaller group usually leads to inflated prices. But it also means less choices for you, the consumer, and I know you want choices.

Those Other, “Slower” Proxies

With instant setup proxies outlined, I think it would be helpful for you to get a full picture of the proxy marketplace, namely those slow-poke proxies that will take 12-72 hours to show up in your inbox.

These proxies heartily mirror the cons of the instant setup proxy, so I won’t get repeat all that information. In short, you will find many more options and dial in on your precise needs when taking time out of the equation.

One of the benefits of signing up for these slower proxies is it assumes you’re in the market for at least a couple months. Why get instant setup proxies if the plan is to use them for months or years? Take the extra day to do your research, connect with customer service reps for a couple companies, and make a good decision. This will ensure your needs get met.

The other major benefit to the slower proxy providers is how hands-on they are. When a provider like this gets your order, they will send an email and ask what kind of proxies you’re looking for. They will do their due diligence to find proxies that fit your needs, handle it personally, and check in to make sure they’re working afterward. That kind of service is something you pay good money for, but it goes a long way.

All that said, the reality is that these slower proxies providers are not necessarily better. You have to do comparisons to see if they are. You could certainly purchase proxies from a provider that isn’t instant setup, only to find the instant setup would have better for your needs.

There is no perfect proxy. You will still have to hunt for good deals, reliable customer service, unused proxies, and proxies built with the functionally you’re looking for.

Go Set Up Your Proxy

The big question at the end: have you decided what proxy provider is right for you? In no way was my goal to convince you that instant setup proxies suck, or aren’t the way to crawl the internet. They absolutely can be, if it fits your needs.

If you’re still very unsure, or don’t want to take the time to do the research I recommended, find two services that offer free trials. One service should have instant proxies, another won’t. Assuming you don’t need them in the next hour, test the proxies from both services on the applications you’ll be running after you purchase. Plug them into your browser, your torrenter, your scraper. Do some hard testing on these and, if the results come out the same (or similar), your choice will be made for you.

The post The Pros and Cons of Using Instant Setup Proxies appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

In the world of proxies, Ticketmaster scalping is an often tried, often failed experiment. It used to be more possible and common to load up a handful of proxies, set them with your credit card and account numbers, and hunt tickets the minute they go on sale. I say “used to be” because the internet world has taken some serious leaps since proxies and Ticketmaster first came head to head.

As you can maybe guess, purchasing batches of tickets from Ticketmaster with a bot is not allowed by the company, and is generally frowned upon in the music industry. This practice has led to the rise of scalpers who purchase tickets in the hundreds or thousands only to sell them at double or triple their original cost. This makes the attendance of said concerts and festivals questionable (since a single person can own hundreds of tickets), and the general practice of seeing live music less enjoyable.

What I’m trying to say is, if you’re going to take the advice of this article and use proxies to get Ticketmaster tickets, don’t abuse your powers. Use the proxies to make sure you and your buddies get tickets. Forcing ticket prices higher with tech is not a very fun game, and you won’t make many friends doing it.

Even with my opinions about scalping, it’s important to know how to use proxies on Ticketmaster. You want to at least level the playing field. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve waited for the clock to strike 10:00AM for Radiohead tickets only to find were gone in a blink.

How is this possible? Proxies.

TicketMaster Proxy Primer

To give a primer on the subject, Ticketmaster is one of the most aggressive companies in the world when it comes to proxy bans. They really, really don’t like it when bots buy their tickets, and have a lot of excess cash devoted to stopping the practice. You, therefore, need to use your proxies wisely, and you need specific kinds of proxies.

Let’s start with the things that won’t work:

• Free proxies won’t work. This may be obvious, but if you’re thinking about using free proxies, even thousands of them, to help secure Ticketmaster tickets you will not succeed. The likelihood of those free proxies—which have been handled left and right all over the internet—not already being flagged in the Ticketmaster database is highly unlikely. Since they’re free you’re probably going to try anyway. Go ahead, try. Just don’t do it for a concert you really care about.
• Shared private proxies won’t work. Some providers offer paid proxies that are shared with a handful of users. Don’t get these for Ticketmaster. You will encounter similar issues as you did with the free proxies, in that one of these other shared users might get the IP addresses banned.
• Static, unchanging proxies usually won’t work. This step will be addressed much greater below. Some proxy services will give you, say, a batch of 10 proxies, but won’t change them very often (or ever). This won’t work for Ticketmaster Proxies because eventually the company will ban your proxies, and you’ll need to find new ones.

Essentially you’re going to need elite private proxies, and ones that aren’t static, for Ticketmaster spinning (another word for buying tickets in bulk). But proxies are just the first step. You’ll also likely need a software application to help with the deployment of your proxies. These can get very expensive—the most popular one, Ticketmaster Spinner Bot, is $990. You can watch it in action here.

However, I’ll assume you’re ready for that investment, or want find a coder who can work with you to make it happen. You’ll need software to help you because the goal is to open multiple purchase orders with Ticketmaster at the same time, presumably the moment the tickets go on sale. It’s too clumsy and slow to open multiple browsers and tabs, manually enter in all your purchasing info, and try to get tickets.

Those Radiohead seats will be gone by the time you click “Submit.” Software with a smart API will allow you to pre-load all of this information (your credit number, your address, your account information, etc.) and just click “Go” once.

The proxies are needed because if you were do to this with your normal ISP IP, Ticketmaster would immediately block your account. You can open multiple purchase pages from the same IP address, but you can’t open dozens of them. So, you need proxies, and you need elite private proxies.

But you need more than that. You need rotating proxies.

5 Reasons Why You Need Rotating Proxies For Ticketmaster Spinning

Rotating proxies come from services that specifically that type specifically, and it means the proxies are rotated daily, sometimes hourly. Often providers sell batches of proxies, say 10-50, and rotate them every few hours. This will give you a fresh batch multiple times a day, which means your proxies won’t get stale, and even they do you’ll have new ones soon.

Here are the 5 reasons you need ‘em.

1. Hands-Free Service

This is the most obvious reason. With rotating proxies you won’t need to manually check on your proxies. If you have dozens or hundreds of proxies running at the same time, you’ll need to check on them every hour or so to see if they’ve been banned by Ticketmaster. Then you’ll need to update, grabbing reserves of proxies from your provider, and upload those.

When you have a rotating proxy service, you will just need to enter your new proxies at the exact hour they are provided to you. Set a timer for that moment, copy and paste the new proxy list into your application, and continue spinning.

Likewise, you won’t have to do anything if a proxy gets banned. If you made a habit of getting your proxies banned, you’d have to explain yourself to your provider, and possibly talk to your ISP. This eliminates that hassle because, banned or not, you’ll get new ones in a couple hours.

It’s the first in the list because of how simple and straightforward it is.

2. Less Captchas to Solve

Every Ticketmaster purchase will require a captcha. A captcha is that little part of a transaction where the company asks if you are a human. It asks this by displaying an image with hard-to-read warped words that you have to correctly decipher. I’m sure you’ve seen this and completed one.

Captchas are the main way Ticketmaster discerns if you’re a bot or not. Like any good protection measure, Ticketmaster doesn’t outright ban your account if it senses you’re a bot. It puts you and your IPs through a series of increasing captcha tests. The more Ticketmaster is concerned about your validity as a human, the more captchas you’ll have to pass.

This is frustrating and time consuming. Assuming all your proxies aren’t virgin proxies (proxies that have never been used before), rotating proxies will keep your captcha requirements low. Rotating proxies are less likely to get noticed or banned because they are used infrequently and inconsistently. This puts them on a lower totem pole of banned principles, which frees up your time.

Ticketmaster Bot Spinner, and other good programs, won’t bypass the Captcha system (it’s not possible to do that), but they’ll make you enter the Captha’s yourself in a row. This gets them out of the way before the tickets go on sale.

Residential and Rotating IPs

The next three examples go under the assumption that your rotating IPs will also be residential IPs. Often rotating IPs are sourced from residential IP lists because it’s easier to rotate pools of residential IPs, as opposed to data center proxies which are easier to sell in bulk.

I’ll note here as well that residential IPs have their own set of stigma in the proxy community, and it can be hard to find a legitimate provider for them. Do ample research in this field before making a purchase.

3. Residential IPs are Hard to Detect

If your proxy provider is dishing out rotating IPs, the chances are they’ll be residential IPs as well. The main benefit of residential IPs is that they appear to be (because they are) coming from someone’s home. These IPs have a different identification number than data center IPs, which will allow them to be accepted by many more sites. Ticketmaster is one of those sites.

Ticketmaster wants to believe you’re a human being, and is weeding out all the bots who are clearly not. If your proxy IPs look like they’re real people from real homes, instead of data center obvious IPs, Ticketmaster will be a lot less likely to ban them.

4. Slower Speeds Look more Natural

To go along with this, residential and rotating proxies should be a bit slower than data center proxies. This makes them look much more natural. If you’re requesting 500 tickets from Ticketmaster at once, with IPs that are all data center and therefore look a certain way, all at the same lightning speeds, a red flag will go up.

A good practice overall for Ticketmaster spinning is to reduce your ping speeds a little. This is especially the case with data centers, but rotating IPs have that capacity built in too.

5. Rotating Proxies Are Cheaper in the Long Run

The proxy game is a tricky one. You might think the quickest proxies that activate immediately are best. The reality is that you want to play a long lasting game with proxies, not a quick and brutal one.

If you are buying proxies for Ticketmaster spinning, consider how quickly a batch of non-rotating proxies will last — even if you have 500 or 1000, even if you’re careful and don’t use them 24/7. Even then Ticketmaster will eventually find you out, because you’re using the same IP addresses.

This means you’ll need a full refresh from your provider, which they might be fine with the first couple times, but if you do it too often they’ll get upset.

The other factor is that Ticketmaster can ban entire subnets when it detects proxies, not a single IP address. Typically your non-rotating IP addresses will be in one large subnet, or a couple subnets. If you have 100 IPs all in one subnet and one, just one singular IP gets flagged by Ticketmaster, it could compromise all of those IPs.

While rotating and residential proxies might be a bit more expensive monthly, you won’t have to replace your IPs, subnets, and provider, so it will probably save you money in the long run.

In Summary

I don’t condone Ticketmaster spinning for mass scalping, but there’s certainly a method to the madness of getting in early on a good concert. This guide points you in the direction of rotating proxies, and there are a couple good places to find them. ProxyMesh is one such provider, as is Luminati, though this one has some moral issues.

Remember, this is just for Ticketmaster. Rotating IPs are useful everywhere else, but not necessary. For Ticketmaster, who has one of the fiercest approaches to stopping proxy purchases, it’s extremely helpful.

The post 5 Reasons Why You Need Rotating Proxies For Ticketmaster appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.

You know how war is an art? Well, lot’s of things are an art, especially Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’ll spare you the basic lecture on SEO because if you’re planning on using proxies and software to boost your search rankings, you know exactly what it is. But that doesn’t mean you know how to optimize your website for search, and even if you did, you don’t know the art of it.

I don’t mean to talk down to you. The reality is almost nobody knows the art of SEO warfare. That’s why you can pay companies thousands of dollars to help you. It’s also why countless software applications have been developed; why black, grey, and white hat techniques are hotly debated over the internet.

In an increasingly internet-centric world, SEO is currency that multiples its own wealth. It’s completely understandable why you want to get in on the gold rush, and I’m here to help.

I’ll be focusing on the ways to do this with SEO software, because you probably don’t have thousands to spend (monthly) on a specialized company. That said, money is going to be an important piece of this How-To. SEO software, especially the best software, isn’t free, and many of the proxy types I’ll be discussing below will cost monthly as well.

You’re likely doing this to grow a business. You want it to be more searchable, and therefore more profitable. These tools should be viewed as further investments into that business.

Why Proxies?

When you do a quick Google search on this topic you’ll find a number of people asking why they actually need proxies for SEO software.

There are a number of answers.

1. Running keyword searches and other data-heavy allocations / requests can put a lot of strain on your connection and ISP IP address. Using more IPs to accomplish the same task will increase the overall completion time.
2. The most common reason anyone uses a proxy. If you’re performing anything other than extreme white hat techniques, you’ll want proxies to make sure your actions can’t be traced back to you. I’ll have some words of warning below.
3. Prevent blocking. Even if you are performing legitimate white hat searches, Google and other companies will block your requests if they are repeated too often and from the same IP. The second you load your IP address into a software application it will use that IP like a bot, not like a human. It doesn’t mean you’ll get in trouble, but you will have to wait until you’re IP is un-banned.

The reality is that if you want to use SEO software successfully, you’re going to need proxies. “But what kind of proxies?!” you chant from the endless plains of the internet. I’ll put multiple kinds in context below, and show you how to go about finding your own.

Finding Proxies for SEO Software

The issue with giving blanket advice is that nobody has the exact same situation. We’re all using slightly different methods to achieve similar ends—a better ranked page with more traffic—but the roads to get there are not simple or written in stone.

Did you know that Google updates its search algorithms and processes 500-600 times a year? They don’t conduct major overhauls that often, but the search giant is constantly changing the rules. With proxies and SEO software, there are no hard and fast rules. There are guidelines.

A Note on Free Proxies

Free proxies can work for some basic SEO software applications, like ScrapeBox. You can even use ScrapeBox to help you find more free proxies. However, free proxies will never live up to the sheer workhorse of an elite private proxy.

The issue is that if they’re free, everyone is using them. If 100 people are using the same IP address to do all sorts of internet pinging, that proxy will get banned very quickly. Such is the case with all free proxies.

If you’re looking for a better time management system, or wondering why all your free proxies keep breaking, that’s why. Stop using them and move on to a private proxy provider. Yes, it will cost money. Remember, this is an investment.

Ask the Provider 

The first and almost-always foolproof rule in the guidebook is not complicated, it doesn’t cost any money, and it usually results in a better understanding of both the software you’re using and the proxies you may buy.

Ask your provider. Do it. Every single legitimate proxy provider should have a “Contact Us” section. If they don’t, beware that provider.

You’ll want to be straight forward in your request for information. Ask what type of proxies they provide, what types of software or platforms the proies typically work on, and what level of technical troubleshooting is available. That last step is key. Some providers are very helpful and very tech-oriented, so you’ll get real answers from a dedicated staff. Others will just try to sell you more product, which you don’t want or need.

You can go about these requests in two different ways:

1. Ask the provider what software works best with their IPs. If you haven’t already pulled the trigger on a type of software but have narrowed it down to one or two providers, shoot an email and ask which SEO software tool works best with their proxies. ScrapeBox, GSA, and SEO PowerSuite are all popular options (there are many, many more). If the provider says a certain kind works better and you like what they’re offering, go that route.
2. Tell the provider what kind of software you have and ask if their proxies work. Sometimes you’ve already paid for the software. In this case tell them what you have and ask if it works in certain use cases.

Both of these methods will require you to be specific about how you want to use your proxies. You should say things like, “Will your proxies work for ScrapeBox’s Keyword Harvester?” or “How do your proxies hold up with SEnuke’s backlink posting capability?”

The readers who balked at that second question have a leg up on the game, because they know the difference between a white hat and a black hat question. Automated backlink posting, like that conducted by SEnuke, is frowned upon in the industry. It automatically leaves comments on related blogs and sites with URL links back to your own website. This is considered “cheating” because you’re not generating quality backlinks.

The Warning

We’ve reached the point where a proxy warning is necessary. The warning applies always and to every proxy. Ready?

Proxies can be used for very illegal things. You can bring down Government websites and infiltrate famous companies with proxies. They are powerful and yet, in many ways, are the backbone of a functioning internet. The sort of things you’ll be doing with SEO software application won’t destroy the internet, but certain aspects of those actions can get you into trouble.

Automating backlinks, falsifying articles with bots, and trying to cheat PageRank stats can get you in trouble. If you ask a provider a point blank question about grey or black hat tactics, they will probably not want to do business with you. If they do not care, they’ll officially say in the email that their proxies shouldn’t be used for that, and then ask how many you want to buy.

Due to the fragile nature of proxy use, this is always a tight rope to walk. Do what you will, but be aware of the consequences and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Providers with Many IPs

Now that you’re properly warned, we can get into some specific proxy traits a good provider will have. The first is to find a provider that boasts a huge number of IPs.

With SEO software you’re typically running a massive number of requests per minutes in order to retrieve data. The keyword harvester is a good example. Depending on how many results you’re looking for, you’ll want 10-100 dedicated, elite private proxies and need a provider that can provide that number. That number alone is not so high.

You’ll also want a provider that refreshes those IPs monthly, or on request, if they stop working. Even though keyword harvesting is perfectly legal, Google does not like it when bots send millions of requests. Your IPs can get suspended or banned, in which case you’ll need to ask (or buy) more. This means the provider will need a backup cache of proxies for every client they have, which starts to add up.

Lastly, a provider with a large number of IPs and subnets (groups of proxies starting with the same numbers) will be able to do more for you. Often a proxy provider will say their proxies work great for SEO software, and you find out three months in that some of them just keep failing. You can’t figure out why, and the provider can’t figure out why.

A proxy provider with many IPs and subnets will be able to thwart this issue by providing you different IPs from different subnets so you can test things out. This is invaluable and will help you build a concrete way to deal with proxies.

SOCKS vs. HTTP vs. HTTPS Proxies

The above are three different types of proxies. HTTP is the most common and what many providers have. SOCKS and HTTPS are more secure, less common, and typically more expensive than HTTP because they provider much higher security. They also function better for certain types of connections, which can be invaluable for SEO functionality.

Granted, the additional security and specific functionality is often more in the black hat realm of proxy use, so I won’t get into details. In general it’s a great idea to get SOCKS and HTTPS proxies if you can because they are more secure. Your actions won’t be traced back to you, and Google bans them a lot less often because they are not as common.

This is another case of “Ask Your Provider” to find out why type of proxies they have on tap. Most that have SOCKS advertise that fact, but it’s not always the case with HTTPS. Usually a provider will roll all three into a bundle and ask what kind you want when you sign up.

This is another great way to test IP processes to find the best ones that work, and at the least you’ll have more options and security, which is never a bad thing.

Residential IPs Over Data Center IPs

One of the bigger conversations in the proxy world today is residential IPs vs. data center IPs. Residential IPs are the addresses your ISP provides you with. Data center IPs are usually what proxy providers have; they are large batches of IPs stored in a data center, and are just waiting to be used.

Companies like Google can tell the difference between these two types of proxies. The theory goes that residential IPs are seen as human requests, while data center IPs are seen as bot requests. This doesn’t mean that Google denies every single data center IP that tries to come through its door—hardly. But if you have 100 IPs all from the same subnet pinging Google too often, it will be quicker to ban and captcha you, which will stop your harvesting in its tracks.

To avoid this you can seek out a provider that offers residential IPs. These can be hard to find and the ethics are a little sketchy at times, so be aware of that.

In Summary

Those are four solid steps on the path to finding the best proxy for your SEO application. I can’t recommend asking your provider enough. They are probably the most well versed in what will work, and what software is best on a day to day basis.

When in doubt, any elite private proxy will work better and longer than a free proxy.

The post How to Find Proxies to Use With SEO Software appeared first on GhostProxies Blog.