If you are one of those people who conducts most of their business online and virtually lives on the internet, you may have come across the many restrictions websites put out for certain visitors. We’ll give you an example; suppose you want to watch content from over-the-top media service providers like Hulu. The glitch here would be that to stream on Hulu you will need to be in the United States because the access is controlled by location. It would not matter if you were a US citizen sitting at an airport in Germany, the servers will read you as German and will not allow you to access.
Changing your IP address is becoming a requirement, and most of it is because a lot of websites restrict access based on where your computer is located. These restrictions happen because of licensing issues, another could be in accordance with the local laws. But there is no direct way to counter this because your IP is assigned to you, other than using a proxy, or a virtual private network. Now both are great at changing your IP address accordingly, VPN is the slightly better option, but it costs more and may affect the speed. Let us take a look at different scenarios where we would need a US proxy.
Making Money Online
Auctions
If you want to make purchases from a country that is not the United States, you will need to purchase proxies. Whenever you try to open eBay, your computer sends a request through your service provider and pings eBay’s servers. This request is then distributed along eBay’s many servers, but usually within your home country. If you are a power buyer (and reseller), this won’t work for you because you may or may not see newly-listed items displayed on other eBay servers.
To see the new listings, you would have to have access to search from different locations, and for that, you would need proxies to gain an advantage over competitors. For better overall results, a reputed provider will offer dozens of locations within the US where you can go through the listings and make your purchases based on your requirements.
Classified Advertisements
Craigslist is a great website if you are looking for great services and offers. If you are a seller, Craigslist offers a great platform where you can sell nearly anything if you have the right attitude and if you can manage to find an appropriate listing to make your purchases. It is such a popular place that no matter what your ad is, it will certainly get a lot of viewings.
But if you are not in the US and still want to place an ad at Craigslist, you will face a problem in the form of restrictions, since you will not be able to post your ads then. To counter this, you will need to use US proxies to change your IP so that Craigslist allows you to view them. Craigslist will read you as a visitor from the US and let you post or view ads.
Optimizing SEO Campaigns
If you are an SEO expert and you access Google’s search engine often for work, you may have come across the message that Google needs to block its service because it thinks that you are sending automated queries. It offers you a CAPTCHA when this happens, and it is all fine, but if this is what you do day in and day out, there is simply no way you could be filling that in every time this happens.
To overcome this annoyance, you will have to pay a small fee to access private proxy servers or even better residential ones and the good news is that they are provided by a lot of reputed companies. The proxies would take care of registering any number of accounts on a site, fetching the data from Google so you don’t have to fill out CAPTCHAs and can also check your website’s search engine rankings from that particular location.
Managing Social Media Networks
If you are a marketer and you have none or little presence on social media, it won’t take an expert to tell you that you are missing out on a massive amount of business. You would have noticed that most of the big businesses out there have a visible presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks. And, as it so happens, most of these networks have checks in place and geographical restrictions to keep spammers at bay. Besides, even if you could do it manually, it would either consume a lot of time or you would have to outsource it.
A way around it is to buy proxies that offer tools to do that for you, around the clock. These tools will follow or unfollow on Twitter, like or unlike on Facebook, and so on, regardless of your location. The best type of proxies for this purpose is data center hosted proxies (since they don’t change with the time). You get the picture.
Shopping
Copping Sneakers
Back in the day when there weren’t many choices, buying shoes were as easy as visiting your local shoe store, putting some money on the counter and walking out with new shoes or sneakers. But now times have changed; big brands such as Nike release limited edition shoes that are sold out in minutes.
For doing this, you would need “sneaker proxies”, and it is a must have if you do not live in the US. These proxies are super fast (which is very essential) and speed up the check out process, letting you cop a sneaker a two.
Geo-Restricted Web Content
Are you a US citizen who has recently shifted to China (or anywhere else for that matter)? Then, whenever you have tried to access websites such as Netflix, you may have gotten a message saying the service is not available in that country. The simple reason behind it is that Netflix does not have a license to stream in China. And one of the very limited ways to get around it is using a proxy.
A US proxy server will act as a middleman and will get the restricted content on your screen. Anyone monitoring will see that the content is being accessed by the proxy server, but your IP would be masked. Voila!
Anonymous Surfing
If you live in a country that restricts certain sites, US proxies will allow you to hide your IP and allow you to access the contents of these particular websites. If you are tight on money you can get cheaper shared US proxies. You can do this without being detected because the US proxy server will “tell” the powers that be that you are based in the US. At the same time, the URLs that you visit will be encrypted by the proxy server, making them absolutely untraceable.
Conclusion
After reading this article, you are hopefully well-informed about why you need the US proxies. Proxies based in the US are not only fast and anonymous, but they are also reliable and discreet. What’s more is that they do not advertise the “bypassing” functionality openly on their websites, so you can surf to your heart’s content without the fear of being scrutinized.
