Recently I made a post about private proxies (see how to use a proxy). Proxies are important to use if you’re doing anything which you don’t want traced back to your IP. This sounds as if you’re doing something illegal or sinister, but really the way I mean is in cases where you’re performing a lot of tasks from one IP address. One example would be in using Market Samurai. Market Samurai is a fantastic all purpose marketing tool for doing excellent keyword research, finding backlinks, finding content for your site, tracking your ranking, and much more (check out my complete Market Samurai review).

Proxies Vs. VPN

Market Samurai does hundreds of queries to compile the results you request of it all within a time of just a few seconds. If you use Market Samurai a lot, then it can start to look suspicious very quickly if all of that activity is coming clearly from your IP address. Therefore a lot of marketers use generally either proxies or a VPN to mark their activity. Today I’m going to talk about Proxies Vs. VPN to give you a better idea of what each of them is and which you should be using.

Proxies Vs. VPN; they both work towards the same purpose: hiding and masking any activity which you perform while using them so that those activities are not traced back to your IP. If someone did notice a lot of activity coming from your IP, depending on who noticed it or who they told you could get your IP shut down/banned for a period of time. If you created a lot of backlinks all at once using automatic link building software, then those backlinks could be deleted, as well, or worse if they decide to take it further since it’s obvious where those links are pointing to.

Therefore we use proxies or VPNs to make it appear that all of that activity is happening from multiple IP addresses around the globe. Making anything you do look natural is always the key because natural is what ranks well, and anything which looks artificial or manipulative will not only not work but likely get you in trouble on way or another.

But what’s the difference between proxies and a VPN? A private proxy is a proxy which only you or only a select few have access to. This is in contrast to a public proxy which many people use in place of their IP, generally because it’s free. The problem with this is that if it becomes apparent that too much suspicious activity is all coming from the same proxy, that proxy will be shut down and therefore rendered ineffective.

Private proxies require a password for someone to gain access to use them. I like BuyProxies because they’re cheap and their proxies are good at just $1 a month per proxy on the shared plan.

If you ever have an issue and find that a proxy which they have assigned to you is not responsive, they’ll send you a new slew of them post haste.

A VPN on the other hand stands for Virtual Private Network. I like Hide My Ass‘ Pro VPN option which turns out to be cheaper than running private proxies. With the HMA Pro VPN, your internet connection is masked behind any one of a massive list of 20,000+ proxies which HMA owns. You can set it to swap out the IP at an interval of your choosing.

So what this means is that while you’re using Market Samurai, for example, every 20 minutes you can instruct HMA to swap out your IP to something new. This dynamic IP setup ensures that you never perform too much activity on the same IP and you’ll always have a new IP to work through.

The advantage of a VPN over private proxies is obviously the much much larger selection of IPs to work through as well as the cheaper price. The downside is that there’s a greater chance that an IP will not work and it takes time (about 10-20 seconds) to switch to a new IP which can interrupt your work in some cases depending on what you’re using it for.