The internet holds a virtually limitless amount of information. Whether you seek to tap into it as an individual, for an organization, or for a business, proxies are useful tools for numerous reasons. When you anticipate needing a large amount of bandwidth, unlimited datacenter proxies are a great cost-effective option.
In this context, unlimited refers to their lack of a bandwidth cap in exchange for having a limited number of threads. Any provider that tries to claim they’re offering both unlimited data and connections is most likely holding a bottle of snake oil and has a bridge for sale, too.
Defining Bandwidth
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As you’re probably familiar with, bandwidth is the term commonly used to indicate the volume of data sent through an internet connection during a specific length of time. In this day and age, it’s typically measured in megabits per second, or Mbps for short. When discussing longer time spans or program file sizes is when you switch over to gigabytes, aka GB, or even go all the way into terabytes, or TB.
For reference, a single GB is equal to eight thousand Mbps. Meanwhile, a TB is one thousand GB.
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited bandwidth is when a proxy service doesn’t charge you by the volume of data you use. Instead, they charge by the time and/or the number of connections.
If someone is offering it for free, run. There’s no way it’s truly free. Those non-monetary costs greatly outweigh the low price of an economic proxy service like KocerRoxy.
Typically, unlimited bandwidth datacenter proxies are the cheaper alternative to other types of proxies. Even more so if you’re going to be doing anything large-scale.
Metered usage can sometimes carry hefty charges when you go over your cap. It’s also generally reserved for premium residential proxies or mobile proxies rather than datacenter proxies.
Here are a few examples of times you’re better off with unlimited bandwidth over the alternatives.
- Streaming. Those Netflix binge sessions and YouTube rabbit holes can eat through your data fast.
- Online applications. There are countless programs out there that require constant internet connections. Especially when gaming, team-based Player Versus Player games and Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games come to mind.
- Torrents. If you were dealing with a small file, it wouldn’t require a torrent in the first place, now would it?
- Web scraping. When gathering large quantities of information, whether from a single source or several different ones, you can go through quite a lot of data.
- Stress testing. If you run any websites of your own, depending on your services it can be important to make sure they can handle several concurrent users. Website load testing is an important first step before you get actual users involved.
Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxies have their own fair share of perks and ideal use cases when compared to either residential or mobile proxies.
- Speed. Assuming equivalent quality providers, datacenter proxies are often notably faster than residential and mobile proxies. Who hasn’t gotten at least a little impatient in a world where so many things are available so quickly?
- Availability. Datacenter proxies are more numerous than residential and mobile proxies.
- Price. Thanks to being plentiful and because multiple users can be cycled through the same pool concurrently, datacenter proxies are the significantly more economic option.
- Harvesting certain types of data. Due to their speed and low cost, farming massive amounts of information can greatly benefit from using datacenter proxies. There are unfortunately situations where the sites you’re scraping have protections in place that identify and block datacenters, so you’ll have to invest in residential instead.
And that was all while still providing great anonymity just like the other proxy types.
Unlike residential proxies, datacenter proxies aren’t associated with an Internet Service Provider, aka ISP. Instead, a business owns a usually large block of IP addresses, the digital equivalent to a street address, and will rotate users through them.
IP Authentication
IP address authentication is the term for how a site identifies what type of users are making requests. They’ll look at the IP source and grant access accordingly.
Due to the fact that datacenter proxies are not associated with an ISP, this process can figure out that it’s a proxy instead of a regular user. So, unfortunately, the fact they are datacenter proxies can be traced. Your IP address is still safely hidden though, it just doesn’t look like a normal user.
Since datacenter proxies come from the same network, their IPs will have similar IDs as each other, too. This, combined with the fact that numerous users have cycled through them and used them previously, does increase the chances of bans. Once a site realizes a datacenter proxy is involved, it can block the whole IP range, or at least a large chunk of it.
Because of this, among other reasons, it is very important to rotate your IP address to minimize the chances of bans.
Rotating Sessions
Rotating proxy services offer two different session types, rotating per request or sticky. Sticky will hold an IP address for a specific length of time, while per request is, well, going to change with every request.
As sticky session use cases are a bit more niche, let’s go over the rotation per request sessions.
By changing IP addresses with every request, you look a lot more like a bunch of different people visiting the website, instead of just you over and over again. This is essential when using a bot to automate repeated actions at the same destination, such as when data scraping.
Most websites aren’t concerned with what type of bot is attempting to access them. They try to block all of them. Rapid calls from the same IP address are an obvious bot to them and they will block you almost immediately. By rotating IP addresses, you can avoid this situation.
Manually rotating your IP addresses with certain services can be a complicated process that requires additional software. However, some providers, like KocerRoxy, will handle rotations for you. Thus, making it easy enough to use that anyone can do it.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that unlimited datacenter proxies can save you a lot of money when handling massive amounts of data.
With instant setup and stellar customer service at a great price, KocerRoxy has your unlimited bandwidth datacenter proxies needs covered. Their easy-to-use dashboard combined with their automated rotations per request will serve you well whether you’re using a proxy for the first time or are already a veteran user.
