How Businesses Can Use ISP Proxies For Data Collection
Modern businesses need accurate and reliable data to keep on top of breaking trends, customer preferences, and fluctuating prices. Web scrapers are the tool of choice to obtain this valuable data, but anti-malware services can mistake benign data collection with a malicious attack.
Residential proxies services are a well-known way around this problem, but they come with advantages and disadvantages of their own. A residential proxy is linked to the IP (or internet protocol) address of a real computer or mobile device, so if that device is turned off or loses its internet connection, your connection to that IP address will disappear as well, potentially alerting cybersecurity measures and interrupting services.
While this may not pose a problem for smaller projects, businesses that need massive and continuous data can run into interruptions and slow speeds from residential proxy services. However, businesses like stockbrokers, e-commerce retailers, and social media managers, and anyone else who has a need for large volume and reliable, fast proxy services now have a new and better option: ISP proxies.
ISP Proxies and How They Work
ISP (or internet service provider) proxies are similar to residential proxies, with a few key differences. Residential proxies, like their name would suggest, are tied to a specific location and uses the IP address provided by an internet service provider for that location. This can be a personal computer, a smart phone, or other personally owned device connected to the internet. ISP proxies, on the other hand, use an ISP to assign an IP address and are hosted from a data center. Because of this, they are much faster and provide better stability, as there is much less likely to be an interrupted connection to a data center than there is for a personal desktop or mobile device. This makes them ideal for large web scraping jobs, academic research, stock market research, and much more.
Like other types of proxies, ISP proxies will make a web scraper look like a legitimate user and protect against cybersecurity misfiring. Because of their stable nature and limited number of hosting locations, ISP proxies are especially useful when used with websites that work best using the same IP address over a longer period of time, rather than the frequent rotations residential proxies are typically used for.
