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How do you use private/dedicated/free proxies?
Hi LET,
I'm conducting a bit of research to better understand how people utilize SOCKS or other types of proxies in their workflows, personal use, or other applications. This will not only help improve services but also give us a glimpse into the current trends and needs within the proxy space.
Type of Proxy: Are you using private/dedicated or free SOCKS proxies? What influenced your choice?
Quantity: How many proxies are you actively using? Is it just one for a specific task or multiple for various use-cases?
Geographic Locations: Which locations do you commonly select for your proxies? Is it based on your specific needs, or are there other factors like speed, privacy, or bypassing geo-restrictions?
Applications: What are the primary applications or tasks for which you are using Socks proxies? (e.g., web scraping, anonymity, accessing restricted content)
Reliability and Speed: How important are these factors for you? Do you often encounter issues like downtime, slow speeds, or other performance bottlenecks?
Other Preferences: Are there any other features or functionalities you wish to see or currently enjoy using?
Your responses will provide valuable insights and contribute to a more user-centric development strategy in the proxy sector. Feel free to answer any or all of the questions, or to share your comments or ideas! Thank you for participating in this discussion.
Comments
I use a seedbox software, the links generated by it mess up if I use a VPN.
I put the private socks proxy in my web based torrent client, 1 proxy.
I would like to try rotating residential proxy on my torrent client.
Unfortunately, every time I try to find, torrent not allowed in ToS.
So I end up with just 1 private socks proxy.
I have a Docker container running Gluetun, and then another one with a SOCKS5 proxy. This way, I can easily use yt-dlp together with the proxy and also switch IPs easily.
use for scraping
50 tb in luminati & oxy lab (for production, on contracts with huge discounts), mostly http.
webshare for socks5
other providers for discovery tasks (unlimited traffic).
mostly interested in US. but sometimes need to try other locations in case geo-restriction is in place (try all countries until detect that nothing works).
Sometimes need rare locations to scrape for example Bahrain sites.
I use my own self-hosted proxies mostly for accessing contents that are locked based on location. Also self-host a dozen tools that I use regularly (file managers, web ssh shells, vscode server, ...)
If you dont mind - what do you scrape? Search engines, e-commerce websites, something else?
@vpnfail visit blackhatworld.com there are tons of proxy users. Mostly these guys use proces for social media automation and/or link spamming, contact form spamming etc.
Doesn't sound like the types of members we want in our VPN community
I'd rather listed to what LET members have to say!
Forgot. I also use webshare for whois requests. In countries where limits are available (like UAE, Saudi, Europe, many).
Had to rewrite a lib to implement whois requests via proxies, and webshare works great.
As someone who frequently travels for months behind the great firewall, and usually on short notice, private dedicated residential proxies do not appear to be blocked in a categorical fashion, and gives me time to roll my own system.
I pay for my proxies, generally SOCKS but really it's more about the endpoint, and also, I hate bandwidth-based billing with a passion. That makes pre-pay basically impossible to accurate gauge and makes downloading extremely overpriced when sometimes we'd need a lot of bandwidth and sometimes I don't. Also, it doesn't help that plenty of American financial institutions block traffic from China for some reason, or attempt to call you... even though I leave my US phone in the US because it is effectively useless and only another attack surface, and having experienced getting my account locked because CS can't reach me for.. obvious reasons, it can snowball quickly. That's my personal use-case on a day to day-ish basis (for a few months out of the year, at least). A normal person in China can't even access gmail. I try not to use protocols that are explicitly prohibited and SOCKS definitely has the edge on that over V2Ray and such.
So, as a result, US and residential is what I go for. It can be mobile ones as well but I broadly notice issues in regards to their reliability in terms of how long they stay on. I suspect that my use case isn't common, but just throwing it out there.
I am not sure I understand this part of your message - how exactly does that software work and why are the links messed up if you use a VPN, but not a proxy?
Can you configure Gluetun with custom VPNs, or does it work only with the big providers?
What proxy software do you use server side?
It also supports custom OpenVPN and Wireguard configurations, which means you can use it with virtually anything.
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/providers/custom.md
Totally agree - paying for bandwidth sucks.
Really cool story - especially that it's not the most common use case, thanks for sharing!
This is great, we will share the tool with our VPN community! Thanks 🙏
The seedbox software generates links based one what apps the user installs,
It has 60+ to choose from and each one has it's own link.
https:// website.com/qbittorrent
https:// website.com/plex
https:// website.com/rutorrent
Then a secondary user would have links like
https:// website.com/user/qbittorrent
https:// website.com/user/plex
https:// website.com/user/rutorrent
The links would fail to resolve on a VPN (Probably Let's Encrypt issue)
For the qBittorrent software, I am able to setup a proxy inside the torrent client via settings.
Wireguard, v2ray, sing-box
Awesome! We are launching V2Ray soon. it's the most demanded proxy by our community