Dedicated vs. Shared Proxies: How to Choose It Right?

Modern businesses are required to operate over the internet, and this digital transformation has a wide range of different challenges for e-commerce organizations. As a business, there will be situations where you’ll need to use different tools to ensure increased levels of security, privacy, and anonymity while browsing the web.

That’s where dedicated and shared proxies come into play. Whether you need a proxy that allows you to have several users at the same time or just one, both solutions provide increased levels of security, privacy, anonymity, and reliability. Let’s see what’s a better fit – dedicated IP vs shared IP.

Dedicated vs Shared Proxies

What are Private Proxies?

Private or dedicated proxies are private IPs that are exclusive to only one user at a time. Private proxies give complete control over them to the user and provide a fantastic range of benefits for the IP alone.

High anonymity is the first benefit that comes to mind. Dedicated IPs are highly anonymous as they reroute your traffic via a specific endpoint without ever exposing your location, IP, or identity. It’s the biggest reason why ad verification businesses use private proxies.

Private IPs allow these companies to check the advertiser’s landing page, collect data, avoid getting their IPs detected, filter out false data, and more. Travel aggregators also rely heavily on private/dedicated proxies to scrape and extract data from various sources online, travel agencies, and flight companies.

This type of proxy allows you to promote your brand by creating and managing multiple social media accounts, get access to restricted content, bypass geo-restrictions, extract data for price comparison, and so much more.

What Are Shared Proxies?

As the name suggests, shared proxies are shared IPs available to multiple users at the same time. Even though many consider this type of proxies to be less effective than dedicated proxies, shared IPs pack quite a few benefits for users.

First of all, shared proxies are the cheapest option to anonymously browse the web, scrape data, verify ads, and do many tasks online. Then, they are great at hiding your identity as you use the internet. In addition, they can also help you establish connections from different locations, bypass geo-restrictions, and various web filters, gain access to specific content, etc.

Benefits of Proxies

Since multiple users are using the same proxy, increased anonymity is guaranteed. One of the advantages of shared proxies is that they are extremely hard to detect and identify due to many different users.

They also support HTTP and several other protocols, which is essential for businesses with security issues. HTTP protocols excel at securing connections for your business. When it comes to dedicated IP vs shared IP, private IPs have a slight advantage simply because they are faster and more reliable than shared proxies.

Benefits of Private Proxies

When it comes to the benefits of using dedicated/private proxies, we can name some of them:

  • Top security and privacy – private proxies are excellent tools to increase the level of security, privacy, and anonymity while browsing the web. Since they provide dedicated IPs that only one user can use at a time, your data won’t be compromised.
  • A wide range of different locations to choose from – with private proxies, you can choose to connect to the internet in any location of your choosing and bypass geo-restrictions to get localized SERP data.
  • Incredible speed – since you’re not required to share your IP with other users, private proxies are exceptionally fast, which greatly reduces the cost of maintaining the server.

Benefits of Shared Proxies

Since shared proxies are extremely affordable, businesses choose to use them to improve search engine optimization and web crawling and scraping. In the SEO case, you’re required to create backlinks to improve your businesses’ Google ranking. However, you risk getting marked by Google if you create many backlinks using the same domain.

You can avoid getting blocked or flagged by using shared proxies. As for web crawling and scraping, shared proxies host multiple IPs, which is how they help you bypass any restrictions or security measures, your target websites might have.

You can use these multiple IPs to hit the same targets many times without getting your bots flagged. Browse the web and index websites without any risk of getting flagged.

Which Ones are Better?

In the dedicated IP vs shared IP battle, dedicated proxies win the day simply because shared proxies are prone to security breaches and lack a higher level of privacy when browsing the web.

They are also quite slow due to the bandwidth being shared between users and quite unreliable due to an increasing number of unresponsive IPs. If your task requires high performance and speed, dedicated proxies are the best choice. Oxylabs posted everything you need to know about dedicated IP vs shared IP, so check their website for more information.

Conclusion

Choosing between dedicated and shared proxies comes down to what you need, basically. If you need to hit multiple targets at the same time, shared proxies are the perfect tool.

However, if you’re looking for an increased level of speed, performance, and security, private proxies are the right choice. That’s why it’s crucial to take your time to thoroughly analyze your needs before you choose.