How To Find The Right Proxy Network For Your Company

In this article we will discuss Bright Data’s 4 unique proxy networks, and how to choose one best suited to your business’s needs:

• #1: Data Center Network 
• #2: ISP Network 
• #3: Residential Network
• #4: Mobile Network 
• Bonus section: Proxy Manager 

#1: Data Center Network 

Datacenter Proxies are the most basic type of network you could choose to use. This is due to the fact that they are not affiliated with any Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and typically have a large number of IP addresses assigned to one server. Traffic is routed through these IPs which are pretty easy to detect by target sites, making them best for easy to reach datasets. 

Some advantages include:

• Short request journeys making data retrieval faster 
• This is the most cost-efficient option
• This is a good option for data collection jobs that benefit from origin consistency 

This is a great option for businesses performing a wide range of data collection and monitoring including (but not limited to):

• Collecting financial data (such as SEC filings, stock prices, and volume etc)
• Performing brand protection (e.g. scanning for unauthorized brand mentions or imposter third-party product vendors)
• Scanning the web for competitive marketplace intelligence (e.g. competitor product pricing, consumer reviews, and other product listing data)

#2: ISP Network 

ISP proxies are IPs obtained from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for use by businesses. They are IPs that are registered to real places of residence meaning that target sites identify them as individuals/locals. 

Some advantages include: 

• Enjoying data center-like collection speeds while getting more accurate information, and higher success rates 
• You have the option of buying a dedicated subnet of IPs in order to ensure a clean lineage for better results 

This is a great option for companies looking to overcome rotating and GEO-specific IP blocks with the consistent use of a dedicated pool of IPs. These use cases include (but are not limited to):

• Collecting, and monitoring for data with an emphasis on efforts that can especially benefit from a localized approach. This may include social media sentiment, pricing, and ad display/verification 
• Managing multiple accounts from different geo locations such as companies that have digital commerce Points of Sale (PoS) in multiple locations

#3: Residential Network

The Residential Proxies Network is comprised of real user IPs located across the globe in almost any city or state on planet earth. These people choose to opt-in to Bright Data’s peer-to-peer network, and are rewarded by app developers with benefits such as ‘freemium’ memberships or ad-free experiences.  

Some advantages include: 

• Being able to easily retrieve datasets from very hard to reach target sites 
• Viewing content, pricing, advertisements, and the like from a real, local consumer perspective providing for optimal accuracy
• The ability to send an almost unlimited amount of simultaneous requests without operations ever being slowed down 

This is a great option for businesses performing a wide range of data collection and monitoring including (but not limited to):

• Performing brand protection such as trademark squatting over geographic borders 
• Collecting information on location-sensitive data such as flight pricing, vacation offerings, order volume, and shipping/warehousing datasets 
• Anything related to digital marketing including content promotion, backlinks, ad-verification, redirects, and content/image display verification 

#4: Mobile Network

Mobile Networks are comprised of real 3G/4G devices in every fathomable geography, utilizing the same peer-to-peer network principles detailed above. This network offers complete ASN, carrier, and mobile network targeting capabilities.

Some advantages include:

• Extremely effective, undetectable data collection making it optimal for under-the-radar competitive research and intelligence 
• Performing high level desktop-based Quality Assurance (QA) for mobile applications

This is an extremely versatile option that is especially useful for GPS-sensitive or crowdsourced mobile data sets. Some popular use cases include (but are not limited to):

• User Experience (UX) emulation, and verification 
• Verifying ad campaigns utilizing a desktop interface 
• Quality Assurance (QA) especially for mobile based interfaces

Bonus section: Proxy Manager 

Once you have chosen the proxy network that best suits your business’s needs, you may want to consider taking advantage of Bright Data’s Proxy Manager. This is a tool that enables you to manage all of your proxy activity in one place while gaining access to built-in crawling features that save you crucial development time.

Here are 5 reasons why you should  give Proxy Manager a try:

1. Customized – Instead of independently writing code to unblock content and integrate with proxies, Proxy Manager takes care of this whole process for you. This solution is tailored to your crawling needs including new version releases every single day, as well as constantly improving its capabilities by learning from its hundreds of product users and their needs in real-time.

2. One dashboard –  You can very easily monitor your crawling activities with a user-friendly UI including previewing all requests, the IPs you are currently using (as well as their location and origin), request retrieval time, bandwidth consumption, and current system bugs that you can easily filter and debug on-the-spot. 

3. Global readability, ultimate debugger –  Proxy Manager utilizes the same HAR viewer and networking tab used in Chrome Developers Tools in order to view all your requests along with their details. This sets the stage for Proxy Manager being an Amazing debugging tool, enabling you to easily address issues as they arise.  

4. Bandwidth-light, cost-efficient – This technology gives you the option to skip loading images or any other requests based on your specifications. This comes in handy especially if you don’t need to load images or other data points – you can simply define a rule to skip loading these items, chopping down bandwidth while simultaneously cutting costs. 

5. Cross-proxy integration and management –  Proxy Manager acts as a way to manage, integrate, and coordinate the use of multiple proxies and proxy providers. It functions as a sort of proxy dashboard enabling you to assess and monitor all your activity in one simple and easy space.  

The bottom line 

Bright Data has a proxy network that is suitable for any business’s data collection needs, and budget. Sometimes data collection operations are more complex than choosing just one network which is where tools like ‘Proxy Manager’ come in, helping you manage, rotate, and oscillate between proxy networks based on target data and sites.