When it comes to hiding your real IP address in order to achieve anonymity, people turn to all sorts of solutions. These solutions could involve using VPNs and Proxies-datacenter proxies, residential, mobile, and many more to achieve the goal. That said, some of these solutions are more effective than others. For instance, using mobile proxies always tends to be a better option than using Datacenter Proxies or VPNs. In this article, we’ll establish why going for a mobile proxy instead of relying on VPNs and Datacenter proxies is a more secure option. Let us first discuss their pros and cons to reach a well-informed conclusion.
What Is A VPN, And Does It Work?
A VPN is a virtual private network that hides your IP address to protect your online activity. Your location appears the same as the one where the VPN server is located instead of your physical location, but it might not be sufficient to clear all your other privacy concerns. When you connect to a VPN, you are putting your trust in them not to use, log or manipulate your data and online activity.
While many high-quality VPN services keep their end of the deal, this does not ensure complete privacy and anonymity. Your data is still at risk of being compromised by hackers, free VPN services, and unethical VPN providers. But before we shun VPNs altogether, let us first discuss some of the pros VPNs offer.
Advantages Of Using A VPN
Routing your online traffic via a VPN can help to put users off on the right foot in certain aspects. Let us discuss some of those aspects as follows:
- Hide Online Activity: High-quality VPNs can make your online browsing history anonymous as they can encrypt your internet traffic. This can be useful for people with privacy concerns who want to make their digital existence as secure as possible.
- Secure Public wi-fi Connection: Public wi-fi network connections pose a high risk of being exploited by hackers since they are public and unsecured. Using a VPN can help add an extra layer of security between you and those malicious agents trying to access your credentials and other sensitive data by spying on that network.
- Access Geo-Blocked Streaming Content: People who are on the road too often can get the brunt of region-based streaming services. They might pay for them only to find out that they are blocked from accessing them when in another location. Using a VPN can help with that problem since it can make you appear in the exact location as your subscribed location.
Disadvantages Of Using A VPN
VPNs have their pros as well as their cons. Now that we have discussed some of the advantages that come with VPNs, let us now look at the other side of the coin:
- IP Address leakage: When a VPN fails to mask your IP address with one of its own, this leads to IP leaks. Consequently, your ISP and any websites you visit will be able to link your activity to your identity.
- Selective Anonymity: As discussed above, VPNs can add to your security, but they won’t give you complete anonymity. With VPNs, companies like Google and Facebook can still be able to keep tabs on your online activity and monitor it actively when logged in.
- Privacy Breach Risk: Since the VPN services can access your personal information, they can see your IP address, the websites you visit, log in your data, and your online activity.
- Latent Internet Connection: Since your connection takes a longer route to the internet via VPN, it is bound to almost always slow down your connection speed. This can be a significant inconvenience during gaming, streaming, and downloading.
- Vulnerable to Account Bans: Many online services, such as Netflix, do not like using VPNs to access streaming content that might otherwise be banned in a specific region. While it may not call for legal action, it can put your account at risk of being banned by such services.
- Increased Data Usage: When you are using a VPN, the consumption rate of bandwidth also increases. In simpler terms, it means you are consuming data at a faster rate than you would without the VPN being turned on.
Now let us discuss why like VPNs, using datacenter proxies might not be enough to secure your online existence.
What Are Datacenter Proxies, And How Do They Work?
Datacenter Proxies, in essence, are IP addresses that belong to datacenters. They do not have residential IP addresses. IP addresses for datacenter proxies are provided by cloud server providers and hosting companies. Though they have some advantages, such as being cost-effective, their disadvantages outweigh their pros. Let us look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using datacenter proxies so we can make informed decisions later.
Advantages Of Datacenter Proxies
Following are some of the benefits one reaps when using a datacenter proxy service:
- Cost-Effective: One of the reasons that people are inclined towards datacenter proxies is their cost-effectiveness. They are extremely cheap compared to residential or mobile proxies, making them the more attractive choice for people on a budget.
- Faster Speed: Datacenter proxies hosted on high-performance servers tend to be very speedy in terms of their performance. These come quite handy for users who have time-bound tasks to accomplish and need faster results.
- Unmetered Bandwidth: Datacenter proxies allow users to create and run a multitude of threads as the bandwidth is not regulated aggressively. This is quite a valuable feature for people who need many tabs running for various purposes.
Disadvantages of using Datacenter Proxies
Though they have some pros, their affordable price being the biggest advantage, their disadvantages outweigh their pros. Let us discuss some of the disadvantages of using datacenter proxies in detail:
- Easily detectable: Since the IPs from the datacenter do not originate from a residential IP pool, they can easily be detected by the security measures put in place by certain websites.
- High risk of flagged IPs: Since datacenter proxies are used by many users simultaneously, and even though they might be using them for their individual tasks, they are overly used nonetheless and hence more likely to have already flagged IPs by more sophisticated websites.
- Prone to blocks: Since datacenter proxies are cheap, many people with shady objectives turn to these for their malicious online activities. These proxies tend to get frequently banned as many such users influence the IP reputation in a bad way, and then these IPs end up getting blacklisted/banned by websites.
- Bad IP reputation: Since these proxies are the favorite kind for hackers and other malicious agents who need many IPs at a cheap cost, these proxies are used for scams and, therefore, already have a bad IP reputation. Even if a user has nothing to do with that reputation, he is very likely to bear its consequences.
- Server/Location-bound: Datacenter proxies are servers- bound which means that for their IPs to function, they need to have a physical server in that particular location. That is one reason that datacenter proxies come with limited location options.
As evident from the above discussion, VPNs and Datacenter Proxies have their fair share of inadequacies, making them disadvantageous for many online users who prefer to enjoy absolute anonymity and a hassle-free online experience. Let us now look at Mobile Proxies and the features that make them better in comparison.
What Are Mobile Proxies, And How Do They Work?
Mobile Proxies are portable devices, smartphones, or tablets with a 3G, 4G, 5G sim card and mobile data plan. They use real IP addresses to connect to the internet. This gives them the credibility to fly under the radar without interruption because of their organic appearance and activity.
What Makes Mobile Proxies Superior To VPNs And Datacenter Proxies?
Mobile proxies have residential IPs that are dedicated, and they connect to real network towers. The ISPs tend to shuffle IPs between you and millions of other clients that they have; the rotative IP features make it tough for sites to randomly blacklist an IP. This low risk of mobile IPs being blacklisted primarily makes mobile proxies worthwhile.
Advantages of Mobile Proxies
Mobile proxies have many advantages that rank them higher in terms of anonymity, privacy, and smooth web experience. Let us discuss some of the features of mobile proxies in detail:
- Dynamic IP addresses: Mobile proxies have dynamic IP addresses as they use mobile connections to connect to the internet. This means that a single network might be catering to a host of mobile proxies. The users’ IPs change and are less likely to be stuck with a single IP.
- Absolute Anonymity: Since mobile proxies operate on dynamic IPs, the IPs keep shuffling among different users. This means that they won’t have an IP for too long. In consequence, this makes their online activity secure as their real IP is masked behind various dynamic IP addresses.
- Highly Undetectable: Mobile proxies are highly undetectable because of IP rotation; one user uses an IP, and then the IP is moved to the next person within a short brief time. This makes it extremely hard for websites or hackers to trace back the online activity to the identity of a user.
- Access to IP Pool: Mobile proxies come in handy for people needing quality IPs. They enable users to have a multitude of IP addresses that they can switch to whenever the hour demands.
- Conducive to Multiple Account Creation, Automation: Mobile proxies facilitate the creation of multiple accounts and automation tasks as they have diverse IP pools and rotative nature that can be used to bypass accounts per IP limitation as well as the number of requests an individual can make to a website without setting off an alarm.
- Trusted IPs: Mobile proxies emulate human behavior, as in individuals with real cell phones who might be accessing a site at one place and then another. Since mobile users take their phones everywhere; it is highly unlikely for websites to suspect that a proxy is in action; hence making the IPs trustworthy and highly unlikely to trigger bans.
Disadvantages of Mobile Proxies
There is one challenge that comes with mobile proxies, which is discussed below:
- They Are Costly: Mobile proxies are not cheap and certainly do not come for free. When compared with the prices of datacenter proxies or paid VPN services, they cost a treasure and can seem extremely unreasonable.
Why prefer Mobile Proxies?
We can conclude from all of the above deliberate discussion and comparison of the three services that mobile proxies stand tall because their advantages far exceed those of VPNs or Datacenter Proxies. This is because of their unmatched anonymous, private, online web experience. They might be on the pricier side, but they surely are worth the investment. In a nutshell, mobile proxies are the most undetectable, efficient, and useful proxies out in the market. But one should beware of investing in such proxies after due deliberation, such as the quality and the reputation of Mobile Proxy providers.
Why buy Mobile Proxies from MountProxies?
We provide high-quality, USA- based Dedicated 4G/5G Mobile Proxies that are highly anonymous and have an excellent IP reputation. They come with three kinds of IP rotation services( 1. Manual IP Rotation, 2. Automated IP Rotation/Set Intervals, 3. IP Rotation Via API link) for the convenience of our proxy users so they can have their hands on a new IP whenever they want. You can get your hands on our proxies by reaching out to our 24/7 Live chat support agents here: www.mountproxies.com, and you will be assisted efficiently.