Category: Computing

Why it’s Hard to Buy Proxies with Static Residential IP Addresses

Last updated on April 15th, 2021 at 03:02 pm

Your IP address is unique, there can only be one connected to the internet at any specific time.  However in the world of proxies, that doesn’t mean you’re the sole user as many hundreds of individuals could be using that server and it’s address at any given time.  For standard browsing it’s relatively unimportant that you’re sharing your address, yet for many tasks it’s crucial.

Take situations like managing multiple social media accounts for example.  Many marketers go to great lengths to separate account management onto different IP addresses.  Lots of platforms will penalize people with multiple accounts so marketing companies make sure they have different addresses when they manage different accounts.   So sharing a proxy server and the IP addresses you are using obviously is a risk. You never know what others are using those addresses for and there’s a definite chance that you’re sharing with a bunch of marketers doing the same thing!

Even one or two people using the same proxy actively with something like Jarvee to manage their accounts could cause serious problems.

So the Logical Solution is to Buy Proxies with Static IP Addresses ?

If you have your own private static IP address you can be assured that you’re the only one using it.    A dedicated IP address means that you know you are not sharing it with a hundred Instagram marketers or an email spammer.

Buy Proxies with Static IP Addresses

Indeed sharing proxies can cause more damage than it solves, especially if you’ve just found a proxy server list, or something at the  free or cheaper end of the market.  Many IP addresses are blacklisted and anything you use them for can affect your business, it’s certainly feasible to get accounts locked or penalized by using the wrong addresses.

It makes sense on many levels, using dedicated IP addresses means you have control and also allows you to schedule your commitments without worrying about what other people are doing.  Many people have suffered significant damage to their digital businesses through using free proxies for example as they end up using IP addresses which are blacklisted.

There is however a difficulty though, especially if you’re looking for cheap residential proxies.  That is the IP addresses which are normally assigned to home users, as opposed to commercially registered IP ranges.  The problem is availability, you can normally only get a residential IP address from one route – signing up with a home account from an ISP.  That’s why these addresses are so much, more trusted than commercial IP addresses.  They’re perceived as being normal users from home internet connections.

Proxy Services Won’t Generally Sell Static Residential IP Addresses

Companies can obtain a certain amount of residential IP addresses through a variety of methods.  Unfortunately the majority of methods mean that they have no control directly over the use of them.  They are more likely to have leased access to a residential IP address pool not actually full registered access.

It’s why you’ll often find that the residential addresses are sold as ‘backconnect’ or ‘rotating proxies’  – you can be guaranteed access to a residential address but little else.   Most of these residential address pools are created through free applications or software which are used to route traffic through the users own connection.  It’s why you should be especially careful about using anything for free online, there’s normally a cost but it’s usually very well hidden.

An example of how these residential addresses are obtained is the free VPN supplied by Hola, each user allows the use of their connection (and residential IP address) in exchange for it’s use.  These addresses form the backbone of their commercial operation and their paid proxies – Luminati.

A similar concept is by using Botnets and routing traffic through the connections of infected home PCs. It will give your connection a residential IP address certainly, but it’s obviously a risk using computers run effectively by malware! Using Botnets will almost certainly cause you problems especially if you’re running any sort of automated software or bot too and it definitely won’t give you a static IP proxy either. If you see remote, cheap proxy service suppliers offering access to large amounts of unmetered residential proxies think carefully how they might have obtained them!

So Where Can I Buy Static Residential Proxy Servers ?

We’ve mentioned why it’s very difficult to find dedicated, reserved static residential proxies and you should always check you’re not being offered commercial ones!  There are decent companies who ensure that their IP addresses are relatively clean and safe to use like the guys at Rotate Proxies but it’s not an exact science and sometimes it’s difficult to tell.

They also are one of the few companies who have subscriptions that can give you that static residential IP address too. Believe me there’s not many of them about!buy Static Residential proxy

You’ll find them on the order page as dedicated residential proxies – the address is static and only used by you while you’re subscribed. You can rotate the IP address monthly though if you wish to switch.

Indeed if  it’s important to buy proxies with static residential IP addresses then it might be worth just forgetting residential addresses and focusing on mobile IP proxies instead.

Just Buy a Single Residential Proxy – it’s Often Enough to Succeed

Last updated on January 30th, 2024 at 03:41 pm

If you are reading this page online then you will have connected to this website by using an IP address.  That’s not a guess, without this unique network number then the internet simply doesn’t work.  Every single device has an IP address, whether it’s a smart phone, media streamer to internet enabled toasters!  Every device needs one, whether it’s from your ISP, from a pool of data center IP addresses or via your college connection.

This address is technically completely unique online, although if you share a connection then you’re likely to share an internet address too.  It’s certainly linked to a physical location though and can be easily tracked from any websites, download sites or social networks.  This lack of privacy is unnerving to many of us who wish to use the internet completely innocently but with some level of anonymity too.

Unfortunately this essential address is also the primary means by which we’re tracked, monitored and logged if we don’t do anything to protect ourselves.  However if you invest in just one residential proxy you can both ensure your privacy and use it for all sorts of purposes online.  Whether for commercial reasons like market research, being an online entrepreneur or just so you can use the internet and social networks without judgement or fear.  If this sounds far fetched, there are countries where physical and digital boundaries are blurred and you can be imprisoned for even saying the wrong thing.

This is where the proxy server comes in, an internet protection system designed to allow a little sense of privacy when we’re online.  Although in reality it’s often used in many other ways largely to make money online too.   The proxy server sits in between you and the resources you visit, protecting your connection and hiding your real IP address.

Here’s a little example of what actually happens, specifically when you use a ‘residential proxy network ‘ to surf online.

Single Residential Proxy

As you can see the proxy network creates a barrier between you and the website you’re visiting.  Great for privacy but also for controlling what the websites actually see when you connect to them.  You can channel all your data, a specific browser or even just configure an application like a chrome extension to utilize the proxy network only.

All properly configured proxies preserve your anonymity to some extent but ‘residential proxies’ go one step further and hide the proxy usage itself.

Introducing Residential Proxy Servers

Here’s a quick video introduction to the subject of these smart proxies which you might find interesting.  You can find it on YouTube entitled What are Residential Proxy Servers but for your convenience we have embedded it here too.

As you can see, these residential proxy servers are pretty sophisticated and best use cases are valuable.  Although you access them through a single gateway address, the residential proxies can rotate through a number of different addresses.   The critical difference for these monthly residential proxies you see is that all the outbound connections are made with residential IP addresses.   This potentially allows a single PC or application to open unlimited concurrent sessions to any website, E-store or online facility.  What’s more each connection will appear as a unique individual especially if the proxies residential based rather than datacenter proxies.

These residential addresses are normally assigned to home users via their Internet service providers.  They are important because they effectively hide the fact that you’re using a proxy server at all.  If a web site sees a datacenter IP address then there’s a high probability that the incoming connection might be a proxy which means any account use is often monitored very carefully.  However residential ips are presumed to be an ordinary home user and will be generally trusted.

It Doesn’t Cost Much to Run a Single Residential Proxy

It’s not the proxy server software or hardware that’s particularly expensive it’s the IP addresses.  In fact even one static residential IP can cost quite a lot of money to acquire for a proxy network.  The problem is that residential IP addresses aren’t allocated anywhere outside the home user/ISP arrangement so they’re very difficult to obtain.  Datacenter IP addresses are simple to get and therefore very inexpensive, but they’re very easily identified as being proxy servers.  Let’s face it if you’re using a disguise you don’t want a big sign over your head stating that you are in disguise!

There are a variety of ways in which these proxy service companies can actually obtain these residential IPs to use.  However some are very time and capital intensive so it’s obvious these costs are going to be passed on to their customers.  In some ways this is part of why residential proxies are so effective in a variety of roles, they’re beyond suspicion.

Lots of people use them to buy sports shoes online from restricted sales sites.  They are effectively called sneaker proxies and are used to bypass the sale restrictions from sites like Nike, Adidas and Supreme.  In fact many people set up with sneaker bots, sneaker proxies and a few different forms of payment make thousands of dollars buying and reselling sneakers online.

retail locations resources

Have a product or service you need to sell, why not use a proxy to post under multiple accounts on a website like Craigslist or Instagram?  If you have the right product this can multiply your potential market several times if you’re careful.  There’s really no limit to the potential number of accounts which you can run on all sorts of platforms when you use proxies.  Another common use is for social media marketing, where you can run things like multiple Twitter or Instagram accounts without penalty.

All these scenarios can produce serious profits but using a different residential IP for each connection is essential.

Best Value are Rotating Residential Proxies

Although it’s great to have access to thousands of residential IP addresses, it’s often not essential to use them concurrently. In fact for most people, having access to one at a time is enough.  Over the last few years by analyzing use cases, companies have created a new solution involving rotation options through each residential IP address. Most of us don’t want to go the expense of having a proxy network sitting idly by until we need it. This is why many proxy service companies not offer something called rotating residential proxies which allow you access to a pool of addresses through a single gateway. The idea is that these proxies rotate your connection through different residential IPs automatically. It’s perfect for running tools which simulate multiple users and the cost is way less than reserving a pool of addresses for your exclusive use.

They’re are only a few places you can buy these residential proxies, one of the most reasonable I have found is this company – RotatingProxies.Com they’re a great place to start if you’re looking for rotating residential proxies for whatever reason.

 

How to Bypass UK Porn Block by Using a VPN Service Online

Last updated on January 30th, 2024 at 04:15 pm

UK Porn Ban VPN Bypass

It’s kind of incredible that this is actually happening in the United Kingdom.  A supposedly mature, developed democracy instigating a UK porn block like some extreme, medieval, religious dictatorship in the middle east.   Yet it’s true that in the Summer of 2019 less that a year ago and two years after the 2017 Digital Economy act. This legislation was passed with far reaching powers to censor porn and worse log and audit personal information of everyone who wants to access porn sites.   If completed anyone who wants to access any sort of adult content is going to find themselves listed on some sort of central government register.  Kind of feels like a sex register doesn’t it and you can be certain that the Government of the United Kingdom will find some way to either lose or abuse the information on this database!

We’ll explain in this article the major flaws in the legislation regarding this UK porn ban, however it’s certainly isn’t a comprehensive list.  If you just want to know how to avoid having to register on the Government’s porn block list. That is, basically to allow access to porn sites and not get stalked by the Government then you simply need to invest in something like this to get around this nonsense – i.e. use a VPN like this one – NordVPN.

bypass uk porn block

These are called  VPN services (virtual private network) which hides both your location and encrypts all your data too. It’s primary purpose is to maintain your anonymity online but lots of people also use it to bypass blocks and filters too. For example many people use this particular software to watch UK Television shows like the BBC iPlayer online when they’re outside the UK. By enabling the connection and picking the right server you can pretend your in a different location.

Now of course events over the last year or so including Brexit and a certain virus have pushed these badly thought through porn laws and legislation off the front page.  Yet don’t think this massive invasion of our privacy is off the agenda. The legislation has been passed and when the Government of the UK have finished selecting an overpriced and incompetent third party  to implement control of access to adult sites.  Only then you can see how much of a step towards a dystopian society this really is.  We’re all fine with politicians and government officials deciding what we can and can’t do online – aren’t we!

The Folly of the UK Porn Block

There are two main reasons why the new UK Porn filter is such a terrible idea which can probably be summarized like this –

  1. It won’t work
  2. It’s a huge invasion of privacy.

Both are important points and equally as valid, although which is the most important will depend on your viewpoint and circumstances.    It’s incredible though that one of the most advanced technological nations has come up with a plan which is so basic and filled with flaws. In many ways, it’s worse than some of the medieval porn ban legislation which are enforced in the middle eastern countries like Saudi Arabia.

However, whatever your  opinions about controlling internet users then it’s worth remembering that anyone can actually bypass the UK porn block quite easily without any specialist knowledge. Indeed  these porn restrictions are highly  unlikely to affect anyone who is aware of it and regularly accesses porn sites. how to bypass porn block

Now I’ve got kids and of course I’m not overly keen on the idea that they have access to huge amounts of porn online.   If there was a technical solution which could prevent them from stumbling across a porn site  online then I’d certainly support it. As long as it worked and didn’t involve stamping over people’s legitimate rights to privacy then fine, it would certainly worth it. It’s hard to imagine though, simply because to make anything that works you have to enforce a very intrusive tracking system.

However the UK Government’s idea to implement the world’s first blanket age verification system is completely full of holes and is basically pointless. Not only have they come up with a system that has serious privacy implications, it has the added bonus of being trivial to get around it if you want. Which is of course what all the real dangerous people will do online. Remember none of these porn verification systems will not even apply to paedophiles or sex criminals, because they’ll have the knowledge to spend a few bucks to avoid them.

What we’ll be left with is a system that doesn’t work, a list full of innocent people who just want to visit the occasional porn site online.  Plus a completely false sense of security that we’ve struck a blow to protect children and vulnerable people when in practice the UK porn block will have achieved completely the opposite result.

Pornography Dominates the Internet

First of all, you cannot control access to porn – there’s simply too much of it and it’s literally everywhere.  The idea that you can create a list of these ‘porn websites’ and pop an age verification block on them is simply laughable.  It’s the sort of idea that an octogenarian grandparent who’d used the internet twice would come up with.   Even with the best efforts you’d be lucky to cover 0.01 % of the available pornography online.  Remember the UK porn block laughably tries to control access to something that exists virtually everywhere online.

What’s more the only sites you’d cover are those with a sense of moral responsibility and a large commercial presence.  That is the sort of sites that probably do the least amount of harm anyway.  Most pornography on the internet is either casually flung around on social networking sites, forums or sharing platforms. Otherwise it exists on the sort of web sites hosted across the world who will simply ignore the assertions of the UK Government.  There is an expectation that you can control access through an individual’s internet service but that’s simply not the case – any simple VPN service from any of the VPN providers will prevent this.

Indeed much of the dangerous and illegal porn exists on places like the dark web which are completely inaccessible to any sort of official filter in any case.  You won’t stop people viewing porn like this any time soon, you might stop them watching regulated pornography access through payment services though.

This means you either end up going down the route of trying to police the entire internet or children (and adults) will be diverted to these less responsible sites.   That’s right you end up pushing youngsters towards more extreme material which become more accessible. The other likely result is that everyone starts using tools which bypasses these filters altogether.

People Can Still Bypass UK Porn Block Easily

Now if the UK Porn block actually worked then the significant impact on our privacy might be worth accepting. However the fact that it’s fairly pointless means that cost is definitely not worth paying. Let’s just consider what exactly is happening here. Firstly anyone who wants to access porn online will have to prove that they are over 18 before being allowed access. Now that doesn’t sound too bad, however what you’re actually doing is applying to the UK government for permission to access adult content or porn.

That’s right, you’re applying to the UK Government so that you can watch a bit of pornography. Although they’re not technically asking anything other than you’re over the age of 18 – without their permission you’re going to get blocked from these sites. However it get’s even worse when you think about it – as the age verification process for viewing porn has other implications too.

Currently the options for these ID checks being proposed – are to upload some piece of data to prove your age – like a credit card, passport or drivers license. Exactly the sort of information that is a huge security and privacy risk to start uploading to the internet. Your other option is to pop to your local shop and get the owner to verify your age and sell you a ‘porn pass’ which allows you access the porn sites.  I’m sure my newsagent has a secure privacy policy in place to manage this process.

Despite numerous delays and postponements it looks like this the porn filter is  likely to happen this time.  The last date of implementation was September, 2019 which didn’t happen.   It’s  worth keeping an eye out of the Government’s information page which you can find here and there’s always possible they backtrack or perform yet another U turn.

Internet Censorship in the UK

Both these options are extremely intrusive but also have another worrying aspect beyond accessing to adult websites and controlling our viewing habits.  They’re potentially creating a huge database of UK citizens who have requested access to pornography. Now of course we’ll be assured loudly and sincerely that all this data will be confidential, safe and not used for any other purpose. Yet how many people will be happy to have details of their sexuality stored and logged on a Government controlled database. How long before other Government agencies seek access to this data, or just as likely the data is accidentally is leaked somewhere?

How many people want their sexuality shared in a database? How many teachers, healthcare professionals or anybody in sensitive positions would want to be recorded as a ‘registered porn user‘.   It’s a huge invasion of personal privacy for a system which most agree is flawed and has virtually no real benefits.

Nobody but nobody in their right minds would want to be on any sort of Government held database which means you’re allowed to access UK porn sites.  Indeed it is almost certain to spike a huge surge in demand for a VPN server  and similar methods to protect your privacy and exist off the grid.  Effectively then ensuring that everyone is driven to protect their internet connections simply in order to avoid the government who’s meant to protect their interests.

How to Bypass the UK Porn Filter

However don’t worry, the UK Porn block implementation is almost certainly bound to contain the usual fatal flaw of these systems. The filter will only be applicable to UK citizens, so the sites will need some method of determining the location of any inbound connection. There is currently only one feasible way of doing this and that’s to determine the location of the inbound IP address. The website will record the IP address and look up to ensure it’s registered in the UK before applying the age verification requirement. Much as the Government would like to officially control world’s internet usage then that’s not really feasible.

Use a VPN Service and Stay Private

Fortunately any decent IP Cloaker like Identity Cloaker  or NordVPN will be able to hide your real IP address relatively easily.  What’s more the best ones operate a no logs policy and will hide all your internet traffic and IP addresses from everyone.  It’s ironic that more people will use these privacy features as a result of this legislation on internet pornography.

So if you use any reputable VPN services for instance which has servers outside the UK then you will be untouched by the verification requirements to check your age.  Your internet connection will be encrypted so no log will be kept of your visits plus you will appear to be from a different country and will not be liable to the AgeID UK requirements.

Some have worried that this could escalate and I’ve seen suggestions that the UK ban VPN service and software.  There’s little chance of this happening for several reasons, primarily because it’s technically very difficult to do – the Chinese have been throwing resources at it for years and they’re still used in China.   The cost to try and block them would be huge and be much more than the cost of age id verification.   Secondly as well as being able to protect your privacy from ‘nanny states’ – VPNs are also legitimate and important business tools used by most global corporations.

The other danger is that it’s creating yet another tier of access online.  If you can afford it by paying for a VPN service (or you can create your own) then these censorship laws and  legislation simply won’t apply to you.  I wonder how many politicians will be installing a a VPN to bypass the UK restrictions and hide their porn habits.  Perhaps they’ll go and register for access to porn by handing over their driving license somewhere !   Everyone else will either risk the dangers of using a free VPN to their personal information in order to access UK porn or just register.  The last category will be the minority that’s for certain.

Our suggestion is to use a proper VPN service who’s priority is security, as mentioned our recommendation is a program called Identity Cloaker which will definitely bypass the UK porn filter and keep you completely anonymous too.   We suggest you use one of their French or Dutch servers which will be very fast when accessed from the UK.

UK Porn Block Explained

The planned Pornography block in the United Kingdom isn’t really a proper restriction.  Instead it’s more of a deterrent, to access legitimate porn sites you’ll need to identify yourself as an adult.   This could involve identification probably along the lines of ‘Know Your Customer” or KYC rules currently used for crypto and banking sites.  Usually you need to present a passport or photo ID and then scan your face for verification.

Then pornography sites would know that their content is only being accessed by adults.  Of course, lots of ‘porn users’ will probably not be that keen to add themselves to a national register of pornography users for obvious reasons !!

Why Have Multiple Social Media Accounts ?

For lots of people the idea of having multiple social media accounts sounds like a guaranteed route to insanity.  Can you imagine logging on to different Facebook accounts and adopting a completely different personae on each one, doesn’t sound fun does it !  Yet for many businesses, creating and managing multiple media accounts is absolutely essential for success.

Multiple Media Social Accounts

It isn’t for every one, and indeed managing multiple accounts does make a lot more work and is often contrary to many social media companies terms of service too, although these can usually be sidestepped easily by using proxies with residential addresses.   However when you start thinking about the possibilities then running a few social media accounts makes a huge amount of sense for the majority of businesses.

Why You Should Have Multiple Social Media Accounts

Here’s a few of the positive benefits –

Segmented Audiences – many companies sell to lots of different demographics.  However that doesn’t mean that they sell in the same way to each market.  For example, you wouldn’t pitch a product to a 20 year old in the same way you’d market to the over 50s.  If you try and balance your posts in a single social media account you risk losing the interest of all sectors.  It doesn’t work.  Using multiple accounts mean you could separate all your customer types and target them specifically.

Location Specific – if you sell to different geographic areas then your message (and pricing) might need to change in each one.  It’s virtually impossible to do on a single ‘worldwide’ social media account.

Product Specific – obviously many companies have different products to sell.  It often makes more sense to split these across multiple accounts so you  don’t dilute your content and lose audience with non-related stuff.

Now obviously this all takes a whole lot more work than simply posting all your stuff onto a single account and there are other issues too.  It might sound obvious that it’s more confusing but this can affect both the company and the fan/follower too.   It might even be the case that you even have some people following your multiple accounts, so you need to be careful how you approach these promotions.  For the bigger companies with many accounts it usually will require a comprehensive strategy for social media promotion to make this manageable.

The drawbacks and the efforts required to manage multiple social media accounts can be significant but rarely will they outweigh the benefits.  Even for smaller businesses and companies running just an extra account or too can bring in significant advantages.   Even if it’s something quite simple like running an account for support/complaints plus one for promotional/branding purposes.

Spread the Social Risk and the Gain

Although it’s pretty much vital for most businesses, marketing anything on the internet can be a huge challenge for a variety of reasons.  One of the most crucial factors is that to leverage the audiences of most social networks is you obviously have to create a presence on each of these networks.  Spending lots of money, time and effort on promoting an account effectively controlled by a third party is not something that most economists or business analysts would advise.   You might have spend years promoting your Instagram account, yet those millions of followers will be worthless if your account gets closed down.

Businesses spend lots of money creating a brand to ensure that their promotion retains value in their own business.   Larger businesses and multinational brands have some built in protection in this extent, but many smaller businesses have been destroyed over night by having their Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest account deleted for some spurious reason.  The simple fact is that using a platform owned by another company is always going to make you vulnerable which is why it’s sensible to spread the risk whenever possible.

Using Multiple Social Media Accounts Effectively

Many of us push the boundaries with many social media platforms in order to build our audiences.  Indeed if you don’t have a million dollar marketing budget it’s difficult not to and achieve any sort of success.  Obviously there are limits, and spamming hundreds of accounts with the same content isn’t going to lead to success in the long term.  However even basic promotional techniques can lead to bans, blocks and even deletions on some social media networks.  It makes sense for lots of us to spread the risk across many accounts and try out riskier techniques on less valuable accounts before trying them on major ones.

Creating, posting and just managing multiple social media accounts can soon become very difficult especially when spread across various platforms.  Fortunately there are lots of social media management programs and tools which can help you ease this workload and lots have free versions or free trials.

Here’s some to check out –

  • Hootsuite – probably the most famous social media tool currently.  It allows you to automate and schedule posts across many different platforms from a central interface.  It includes options to integrate your content in all the major networks plus many other high value resources which can often be ignored – places like Reddit, Storify and Tumblr.
  • Dlvr.it – never heard of it?  Well try it, you can post to multiple systems and generate RSS feeds from lots of sources.
  • Ifttt.com – a strange name and probably one the trendiest tools around at the moment.  Allows you to focus your content on specific sites but then replicate it to other social media sites too.  For many business models with lots of similar content to post, this is the tool they use.
  • ManageWP – not so much social media but for managing multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard.   You can automate posts, perform upgrades, backups and even manage comments for multiple sites from a single interface.  The basic functionality is completely free and you just pay for the premium addons if you need them.

These tools take out a lot of the hard work and organization problems of managing multiple social accounts, however there are other things to remember too.  One of the most important is that many of the biggest platforms don’t like you having multiple accounts and will limit your accounts if they detect this.  The standard tactic is to check if the same IP address is managing lots of different accounts so it’s imperative to use proxies like this to create multiple identities.

One Social Media Account to Rule Them

It’s a nuisance, that you can’t simply run dozens of accounts from the same computer and network address.  However it’s a problem that can be easily overcome by creating multiple identities to use online.     These identities are only useful though if they are kept apart by using different IP addresses when using them. Instagram proxies

Most marketing and internet based companies are well used to these requirements and invest in hundreds of different IP addresses to use along with automated tools to manage accounts for all sorts of purposes. A few years ago you needed to search around for different proxy companies to source a variety of these IP addresses.

Nowadays though there are a few companies who specialize in providing single proxy gateways sometimes called rotating proxies which can provide hundreds of residential IP addresses.

The extent you use proxies and the number (and type) of IP addresses that you need mainly depend on the platforms and the scope of your activities. There are marketing companies and individuals who operate hundreds of these accounts on places like Instagram and Facebook where you need a lot of addresses. You’ll also find these people rotate their address types to match the platform such as using mobile IPs on Instagram too.

Don’t let these complications put you off though, think of them as barriers of entry.  Any individual with a surprisingly small budget can equip themselves with a few tools and proxies and start operating dozens of social media accounts.   These can be used to promote your own business, sell direct or to market other companies.  Many marketers will establish powerful social media accounts in specific niches and then sell them off for huge amounts of money to a company who can utilize them.   If you want to see how much they’re selling for – go visit https://fameswap.com/ and check out the costs for even a relatively small Instagram account.

So if you’re looking for your next million (or your first) and know your way around a computer and social media, have a look at the power of building lots of powerful social media accounts.   There’s a useful post about using Bots to help build those accounts super quickly here.  For a friendly and helpful company to help you get started with proxies here’s two great little companies who can assist – Storm Proxies and Rotating Proxies.

ITV Hub Not Working with VPN

Last updated on February 2nd, 2024 at 11:43 am

Nordvpn Not Working with ITV Hub (ITVX Now)

Slightly late update but great news ITV Hub is now working fine with my Nord VPN service.  I actually should have been able to watch ITV Hub sometime ago but I discovered another issue which I’d caused.  Basically my PC  was giving away my location to ITV player through an external program.  I had a Chrome extension which was causing the problem  and my connection was leaking it’s location through DNS.  This is not something caused by the VPN so it was my specific problem !  If you’re still having an issue with ITV not working with VPN services it’s worth checking another browser to see if the problem remains or visit the dnsleaktest.com to check for related issues.

itv vpn not working

If you’re having problems getting your VPN to work with ITV Hub then you’re definitely not the only one.  Over the last few years, ITV has followed the example of many online media sites and has blocked increasing numbers of VPN services from accessing their site.  In fact they have been so successful that you’ve probably seen plenty of reports that ITV Hub doesn’t actually work with VPN software any more.

ITV Hub Not Working with VPN

This is not true and even in 2020, many people from all over the world are enjoying access to ITV Hub using all sorts of different VPN services.

So What’s happening ?

Why are People Saying that ITV Hub is Not Working with VPNs ?

First an important point – there’s no simple method for any website to detect and block  VPN services automatically.  In fact even China has not been completely successful at detecting and blocking VPNs despite investing millions in the effort.   So rest assured that websites like ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer haven’t got close either.

However it’s true that many VPNs simply aren’t able to access these sites any more.  Which is frustrating if you’re outside the United Kingdom and want to keep in touch with the brilliant UK Television resources that are available online.

So how is your VPN being blocked?

Well it’s actually quite simple, although they can’t detect individual VPN connections they can detect multiple connections on the same IP address.  That’s the problem, VPN providers who overload their servers and stuff too many people using the same addresses.  It’s simple to detect when thousands of people are all accessing the ITV on the exact same IP address.

So the truth is that ITV Hub isn’t blocking all VPNs just those that they can detect by checking overuse of IP addresses.  Loads of decent VPNs still work perfectly fine and have done for many years.  The situation is identical to that of the BBC iPlayer which also targets VPNs using the same method.   The problem is that there is a huge temptation to overload these servers as it maximizes profits and allows them to reduce prices significantly.  So a cheap VPN might function perfectly well as a security program but will be of no use in accessing ITV Hub, BBC iPlayer or other media sites.

Here’s one of the one that works –



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This is Nord VPN and is probably one of the biggest VPN services in the world. However they have invested in thousands of IP addresses in order to maintain their functionality with ITV and BBC and even Netflix. There are others that work but many of those tend to be smaller, more expensive providers who focus on connection speed and service rather than price.

It’s the IP address that’s Blocked Not the VPN

This is actually an important point to make, because it partly dispels the myth that somehow VPNs don’t work anymore or that they are all blocked. Every time you use a VPN then you change your IP address to one allocated to the connection from the VPN server. This is why you need a UK based VPN for the BBC, ITV etc and a US VPN for American locked shows.

It’s also perfectly possible to come across individual IP addresses which don’t work under a VPN service. They are always trying to balance out the equation of how many users assigned to each IP address and it often changes. During surges of popular shows on channels like the BBC or ITV for example there will be many more people using these IP addresses to connect.

Even NordVPN which is probably my best value VPN for watching the ITV Hub you will occasionally get blocked. However this isn’t an issue as you can simply reconnect using a different IP address through their simple interface. There isn’t a VPN service anywhere which can guarantee you won’t get blocked ever. Yet as long as all their IP addresses aren’t blacklisted then it’s never much of an issue.

Tip for Nord VPN users for ITV Hub Working – never use the ‘auto connect feature’ when you trying to watch a popular media site online like ITV.   Just select your country and pick a server manually, if it works ok click on the heart icon to add it to your favorites.  This works much better as there’s a tendency for the auto connect feature to group users on the same servers in my experience.  I never get my VPN blocked using this method for either ITV or BBC iPlayer.

 

british tv in the US

How to Access the BBC from the USA

I love the BBC, their iPlayer site is probably one of the most popular sites on the internet. For me it’s much better than even my $100 a month cable subscription. In fact it’s so good I cancelled this and now just watch stuff from the BBC site for nothing. However the main difficulty with the BBC iPlayer site is that it’s restricted to people in the UK only.

british tv in the US

I can’t remember when the internet began getting like this, blocking and filtering based on simply where you happen to be. Your standard internet citizen is now no longer default across the world, where you login from has a major impact on your experience. The world of online media is a prime example, most large media sites are only accessible to their domestic markets.

Fortunately there’s a way to bypass these restrictions on both the BBC site and indeed virtually any website on the planet! It’s a liberating experience when you suddenly realize that you no longer have these blocks and restrictions applying to you.

How to Watch BBC in the US

The easiest way to demonstrate how to access the BBC from the United States is to watch a demonstration, which we found on Youtube.

As you can see all you have to do to watch UK TV in the US is to change your IP address to a British one. In order to do this you can use a VPN (Virtual private network) as long as the server you connect to is in the UK.

It’s a very simple operation, after installation you just have to click a button to enable the connection. If it’s to a UK VPN then you’ll get a British IP address. However don’t let it stop there, make sure you investigate other countries – e.g a Canadian IP address will get you access to loads of Canadian TV channels for nothing too.

IT’s kind of sad that the internet has begun to adopt these restrictive practices. Of course, they claims it’s due to copyright restrictions and broadcasting rights. Yet why are we still licensing stuff on a ‘per country’ basis while using a global infrastructure like the internet. We’re installing barriers where none needed to exist, so hopefully these 20th century practices will soon disappear. Using a VPN is in many ways will give these companies a push – stating we won’t be controlled or filtered like this!!

Supreme EU Sellout Times – You Need Quick Fingers !

Last updated on October 27th, 2023 at 04:02 pm

It’s getting like a normal person with ordinary reflexes, a passable internet connection and a decent computer doesn’t stand a chance with many of these Supreme drops in the EU nowadays.  They are either restricting the level of each release or there are more and more Bots involved !   Anything that looks good or is even remotely hot disappears in seconds, certainly faster than my chubby fingers can navigate a mouse and a keyboard.

Have a look at these latest times from January where it took for a Supreme release to sell out and there’s no sneakers in these !   You can get complete lists from the Supreme community too who keep records of all these drops.

Supreme EU Sellout Times

The sneaker times are faster still, which shows how difficult it is to cop anything in these drops, let alone something good. Of course quick fingers isn’t going to help, I suspect anything under 20 seconds is pretty much impossible to get manually.  Although I could be wrong so let me know if you’ve got anything from these lists without using software.

Fast/Local Proxies are needed for these Supreme EU Sellout Times

Yet the software although important is rarely the bottleneck if you’re struggling to get anything in these releases.  After all they’re little more than glorified macros, which fire up your details to get those items in the cart, Nine times out of ten, failure is due to proxies which can add a huge lag to your connection if you don’t choose right.

Using a proxy is already an extra hop in the network journey so will add some time to connection unless it’s very quick.  Often people end up using specially configured and designed Supreme Proxies which seems a good idea but isn’t if the hardware can’t cope.  You might not be using concurrent IP addresses but if there a hundred Bots tied to the same server hammering it at exactly the same time when a drop occurs it can slow down hugely.

Anyone who has ever configured any sort of web server will know how a few hundred concurrent connections can bring even state of the art hardware to it’s knees.

It’s definitely something to consider as we wait for the Supreme restock and see what’s awaiting for us next season.  In fact finding the balance has always been something of a trial and error process which seems to change every season.  You can even sometimes get too focused on speed fixated on the fastest Supreme sellout time ever!  Then find adding a slight delay to your Bot pays dividends as you pass through the splash screen without issue.

There are loads of options to consider when you’re trying to choose which proxies to use, but in general there are a few providers which just seem to work and plenty that fail nearly every time.   However even clear, perfect residential proxies if they’re not fast enough will not work properly in these situations.   If you route your internet connection half way across the world you’ll either get blocked as a suspicious location or just fail because of the time lag.

Many people claim that using the Luminati Proxy Manager is the simplest road to success but obviously these are not that cheap.  However you can specify the exact locations of your residential addresses and most of them are fine and sticky enough if you have configured your Bot correctly (usually can checkout before they expire rotate).  You can specify stickiness levels but this costs more again.  However having a residential IP address in the same location as the target Supreme (or any other server) normally works great at least for me.

In fact the right proxy can actually make your checkout even faster than a direct connection!

Other recommendations include using particular fast servers supplied by RotatingProxies although they’re more suitable for USA based drops in my experience.   There’s a good review of some current proxy services in this link here.

Why is Everyone Using Rotating Residential Proxies Online ?

Last updated on October 27th, 2023 at 04:02 pm

Once upon a time,  proxy servers where relatively straight forward things.  Indeed there was only one basic type and their effectiveness mainly relied how well they were set up. Mostly they existed in the commercial and education world as a portal or gateway to important applications or the  outside world. Certainly no-one outside IT departments had any real use or interest in them although their importance slowly grew as the internet became more important.

backconnect rotating proxies

These dedicated proxy network systems were more commonly referred to as application or web gateways sat in server rooms or a data center- which is essentially what they were.  A focal point for controlling access to either the World Wide Web or some important application servers.   However there were signs of how important rotating proxies would become as they were increasingly installed as essential components in other software. Unfortunately as this practice spread it would often lead to serious security problems as they  became unnoticed gateways into otherwise secure networks.

residential backconnect proxies

This was actually quite a common occurrence in  earlier online times – some program or application would install a component like IIS (Internet Information Services).  The administrator often had no knowledge  that they’d just turned that application server into a fully functioning proxy.

It’d likely sit there until someone noticed the bandwidth costs or that they where hosting a best use cases something like a Warez FTP server for half of Eastern Europe!

Today, people have begun to realise the possibilities of routing traffic through proxy servers.  

The key factor is that by using standard or rotating proxies anyone can create, control and operate multiple identities through a single internet connection.  Indeed a carefully configured residential proxy effectively gives anyone a huge online advantage to extend their reach around the world.

They have a myriad of uses and people use them for marketing, promotion on social media, market research or ensuring brand protection around the world too. Indeed many advertising and marketing companies even have proxies dedicated to specific tasks.

Proxies really can be the key to unlocking Internet Fortunes !  

The use of these servers have changed greatly with the expanse of the internet, proxies now have all sorts of legitimate uses too.  They are no  longer simply a basic way of hiding your identity online.  Both the requirements of users and the detection abilities of firewalls, web servers and intrusion detection systems mean that there is an increasing demand for all sorts of specialised and high performance proxies.  Also for something called a rotating proxy which doesn’t have one or two fixed IP addresses.  Indeed these rotating proxy networks are probably among the most widely used commercially.

A proxy network can be based in any location, although most are usually hosted in something called a data center.  The variety though extends to all different types including various methods of proxy rotation which allow unlimited bandwidth and access to rotating residential IPs.

The best proxy can be an important tool used to make serious money online if you know what you’re doing.

Here’s some of the different types of proxies you’ll find –

  • Datacenter Proxies – servers housed in datacenters with commercial IPs.
  • Shared Proxies – servers shared between multiple users and connections.
  • Backconnect Proxy – standard proxy linked to IP address pool.
  • Residential Proxies – servers with IP addresses registered for home use.
  • Rotating Proxies – form of backconnect proxies which rotate through pools of specific addresses automatically.  Normally used with rotating residential Ips to minimize costs.
  • Private Proxies – reserved for individual use (often very expensive)
  • Dedicated Proxies – servers for specific users or uses e.g. Instagram marketing, Search analytics etc. Can also be proxies rotating through different addresses.

That’s only  a few of the common definitions you’ll find plus there are lots of combinations and variations of the above!  Indeed one of the groups we’re looking at now are the combination of two of these proxy server types – so let’s just look at how to make rotating residential proxies.

A Tale of Rotating Residential Proxies

First lets expand on the most important part of this classification – the residential part. This refers to the type of IP address that is assigned to the proxy server.  A residential proxy will have been assigned residential ips (network addresses) which will be used when forwarding requests.

The reason is that any request from a residential address is normally highly trusted because it is assumed to come directly from a home user. These sorts of addresses are only allocated via Internet service providers (ISPs) to home users when they sign up for some sort of broadband or internet connection. No commercial entities should have access to these addresses at all. If anyone needs to mirror or mimic real user behaviour for something like ad verification or web scraping online they need to use a residential IP address.

Let’s take a simple example – say you’re setting up a website which finds the best deals in airplane flights. Obviously the most important component of this is to obtain accurate web prices for the flights to display on your site. Perhaps the  flight companies are rather reluctant to supply the prices directly to commercial providers, so if you try and grab these prices from their website directly they are going to probably block access to your servers (and your web scraping requests).

The trick in this instance is to assign a proxy to access these resources using residential IP addresses. Then all the requests routed through these residential proxies will seemingly originate from ordinary home users who are checking for flights from home.   Your website can then discretely look up flight times and prices then use them as data on your own site.  Perhaps even to earn commission payments from the flight companies who supplied the data in the first place.

Now obviously if all these requests came from the exact same residential IP address then that would look rather suspicious, so you’re going to need a lot of them!  A rotating residential proxy is essential to service any significant number of requests.   This can be difficult as although you can buy residential IPs they tend to be very expensive.    For high traffic websites then you could potentially need almost unlimited residential proxies which will cost a fortune !

How to Get Residential Proxies without Spending a Fortune

For most purposes the solution is to simply share.  Most people just need to hide individual requests and there’s often no real need to own exclusive access to these proxies or addresses.  In our flight scraping example, the key requirement is that each request is routed through an individual residential IP address.  It doesn’t really matter if someone else is using that address to post to Instagram or perform SEO tasks or some other purpose!  Rotating proxies which share addresses make this possible.

Rotating Residential Proxies Which means that it is possible for companies like RotatingProxies to provide access to lots of rotating residential IP addresses without costing a fortune.  Their proxies will control and rotate the IP addresses through individual connections.  To access and rotate through these addresses our flight website would just route all the traffic through a single proxy address.   The same would apply if you’re using a browser or posting through a single computer – just route through a single residential proxy which rotates through individual IP addresses.

It’s the same sort of concept for people marketing and promoting multiple social media accounts.  Without access to lots of proxies residential and commercial we’d be limited to a single account! It’s almost impossible for anyone managing these or conduction market research to operate in that way.

It’s an innovative and ideal solution for many people who work online.  Anyone can effectively operate as a host of residential users simply by using residential rotating proxies.  If you try to constantly query a specific service or site like this on any sort of scale without using such proxies you’re going to simply look like a Bot and get blocked.   The exact same thing will happen to any form of repeated request for example to Google to check adverts or rankings. In fact most online activities on any sort of scale will probably need to buy residential proxies in order to operate effectively.

Remember Residential Proxies Allow you to Control Multiple Digital Identities 

This is a simple overview of how rotating residential proxies are used, however there are further complications depending on the what you’re trying to achieve to which is the best proxy for your needs.

If you’re looking for providers of quality, secure and cheap residential proxies then this company are well worth checking out – RotatingProxies

For larger and higher profile projects where you need a residential proxy on a bigger scale  then there’s really only one option – the world’s leading commercial proxy network provider – Luminati –  they are more expensive though.  They have an extensive range of rotating proxies and you can choose either residential proxy or datacenter ones.  They’ll put the world’s largest network of rotating residential IPs at your fingertips though.

What are Ticket Proxies – Simple Economics

Last updated on October 27th, 2023 at 04:02 pm

If you’ve ever looked online at different ways to make money then it’s possible you’ve stumbled across one of the most lucrative but controversial methods called ticket scalping.  It’s often covered extensively in the media but usually from the side of trying to stop it !  Now despite the morality of the whole business, it’s definitely thriving despite the best efforts of some fairly major players and some of the artists too.

First lets summarise what’s exactly happening without some of the emotion that it causes.  Buying and selling tickets that have been previously bought is simply operating within a secondary market.   With regards to tickets this is simply a market where tickets are resold normally at a higher price.

ticket proxies

Much of this happens through the promoters who are obviously encouraged to sell as many tickets as possible.   This is not just so they can profit directly through  the ticket sales, but from other side goods too.  A concert will make lots of money from additional sales too like food, drinks and those hugely expensive concession stands.

The costs as any concert goer knows can be significant, and often even higher than the initial ticket price.  When I took my son to see  World Wrestling show a few years ago, I spent way more on stupid t shirts and junk on the stands than I did on tickets themselves.

The bottom line is to an economist the very existence of a secondary market means that tickets have either been under supplied or under priced.  Usually it will be a combination of the two, after all concert venues have a limited capacity and ticket prices will be capped to avoid the accusation of exploitation.  The reality is that if either of these factors where modified   then the secondary market would disappear and so would ticket scalpers.

The Ticket Proxies Investment

The market conditions that promote this secondary market are unlikely to change significantly in the future.  The truth is that making money from tickets in this market is actually getting easier if you can get hold of them in the first place.   There are lots of online reselling platforms where you can easily sell on your unwanted tickets at a huge profit.

If you pick any popular concert or event, the chances are that it will be oversubscribed and thus tickets will be in demand.   It’s relatively simple to double or treble the face value of each ticket which can obviously reap huge profits especially if you’ve managed to secure a lot of tickets.

This is of course the key to making money in the resale market – obtaining the tickets in the first place.   It is where most of the promoters focus their efforts in eliminating ticket scalpers which is why to succeed you need the tools to thwart these efforts.

Enter the ticket proxies, one of the most essential tools in making money reselling tickets and in fact anything else which is available online.

ticket proxies

This is one of the leading companies who provide the proxies that ticket scalpers need.  they even supply highly specified servers – you can buy proxies for ticketmaster for example.

Why proxies are needed to buy lots of tickets !

In the physical world,  where there is a scarce supply it’s slightly easier to control who buys them.  We’ve possibly all seen those shops which have sales and purchases are limited to a specific amount.  The only way to circumvent is to leave the store and rejoin the queue possibly slightly disguised depending on how serious they are.  Your purchases can be limited by your physical presence, which is not as easy to do online.

When tickets for a major concert are sold there’s usually a disclaimer that sales are limited to a certain number per person.  However online we don’t physically go anywhere so companies need to use the digital alternative to restrict the number of purchases.  The base of your digital identity is your network address (IP address) and so e-commerce sites will limit purchases based on this.   So you’ll be prevented from buying more tickets from the same connection.

Which is where proxies come in and why professional scalpers spend a lot of money on them.  The proxy is a server that sits between you and the e-commerce gateway which sells the ticket and is crucially the IP address that the company sees.  Sophisticated services like the RotatingProxies  guys can provide proxies which actually switch IP address automatically allowing anyone using them to adopt a number of different digital personas.  Each IP address can potentially be used to buy up to the limit of proxies and so you can buy many tickets without leaving your computer.

It’s tempting, an almost surefire way to double or treble your investment without changing from your pajamas.  

The critical factors  are that the proxies are quick, anonymous and simple to use.  Without the speed you’ll certainly lose out especially in the really huge events where they can sell out the tickets in minutes.  However spending ages configuring your computer to use a different proxy won’t help in this regards either.  Other factors are location and classification – it’s much more effective to use something called residential proxies too, which look like legitimate home users.

There’s no doubt that with the potential to make huge amounts of money simply by sitting at a home computer buying and selling something is hugely tempting.  Also trying to make it appear morally wrong or  insinuate that this practice is illegal (incorrectly)  isn’t going to put many people off either.

The economic solutions to stopping this practice is of course simple – let the market set the price of tickets.   If you charge much more for each ticket then the resell market simply disappears, the price settles at a cost the market will sustain.  Of course there are huge downsides to this tactic in that the performer and promoters now look like they’re exploiting the fans.   Yet worse is the issue that everyone will know end up paying ‘ticket scalpers’  prices automatically.

The other method involves making it very difficult, which is why specialist tools are now needed.  People invest in private proxies for ticketmaster simply because without them they couldn’t buy multiple tickets.  The anti-scalping techniques started to make the costs rise, yet soon technology hit back and implemented changes like rotating proxies which brought them back down.    The best companies are reliant on facilitating this market by actively creating servers which are effective like storm proxies ticketmaster servers too.

While online platforms increase the efficiency of reselling tickets it’s likely that the secondary market and it’s opportunities will increase.   The costs and risks of reselling tickets are relatively low and the potential gains are huge.    The technical side isn’t difficult to learn and if you invest in software to help the purchase – also known as bots then it becomes even easier to make a profit.

What is a Rotating Proxy and How to Use Them

Last updated on October 27th, 2023 at 03:44 pm

I’m beginning to think you can never have enough proxies, and I’m not the only one who thinks like that. When I first started using them to hide my IP address primarily, then a couple of proxies seemed liked all I’d ever need. However when you start working seriously online there’s literally hundreds of instance where proxies are not only desirable but almost essential to the task.

Remember all a proxy is essentially doing is making a request on your behalf. Yet of course this is an over simplification as it’s also hiding your real location, your identity and effectively bypassing any restrictions or throttles that might be in place. However to do this, you need enough proxies to keep switching your identity and location.

For the normal internet user then this is no real big deal and a single proxy with a couple of IP addresses in the right location is enough. Yet if you’re developing computer software, doing any sort of research or an internet marketer then you’ll probably need many, many more.

Why Use Proxies for Web Scraping?
There are two main benefits to using proxies for your web scraping project:

Hiding your source machine’s IP address
Getting past rate limits on the target site
The main benefit of proxies for web scraping is that you can hide your web scraping machine’s IP address. Since the target site you’re sending requests to sees the request coming in from the proxy machine’s IP address, it has no idea what your original scraping machine’s IP is.

When content isn’t available in your country.

Outside of web scraping, proxy servers are often used to get around geo-IP based content restrictions. If someone wants to watch an Australian TV program but they don’t have access from their home country, they can make the request for the show through a proxy server that’s located in Australia (and has an Australian IP address) to get past the restriction, since their traffic seems to be coming from the Australian IP address.

Besides masking your original IP address, another big benefit of using proxies with web scraping is getting past rate limits on your target site.

Many large sites have software in place to detect when there are a suspicious number of requests coming in from one IP address, since this usually indicates some sort of automated access – it could be scraping, or something security related like fuzzing.

The way this rate limiting software is usually setup, if too many requests come in from one IP address in a short amount of time, then the site will return some sort of error message to “block” future requests from that client for a pre-set period of time.

If you’re hoping to ingest more than a few thousand pages of content from a large target website, then you’ll likely run into rate limits at some point.

In order to get around this type of restriction, you can spread a large number of requests out evenly across a large number of proxy servers. Then the target site will only see a handful of requests coming from each individual proxy server’s IP address, meaning they’ll all stay under the rate limit while your scraping program is still able to ingest the data from many requests at once.

Source: https://blog.hartleybrody.com/web-scraping-proxies/

How to Use Rotating Proxies

As you can see, a few proxies won’t get you very far especially using any sort of automated software – often referred to as Bots or scrapers.

Which can be worrying if you’re facing the decision on what proxy to buy. Originally any proxy would normally only be loaded with a couple of network cards and perhaps a few IP addresses.  Clearly though this is not an efficient way to provide hundreds of IP addresses – having loads of servers and hardware sitting in datacentres merely acting as portals.  It makes the supply of large numbers of IP addresses hugely expensive which is why the current trend is to use rotating proxies.

The phrase however can be misleading as it’s not the proxy itself which is rotated but the IP addresses.  What happens is that instead of assigning a few static addresses to a proxy server and then switch between them – it works the other way around.   A single proxy is given access to a large pool of IP addresses which it rotates through when making external connections.

If you’re interested in how you can leverage this and actually obtain a huge amount of IP addresses, using a central proxy which you can simply plug into your browser or software then check out these guys – Rotating Proxies , they often have great bonus deals on too if you’re lucky.