In my previous articles I covered the use of residential proxy servers in sneaker bots, however the name residential proxy servers are rarely if ever mentioned when reading about this growing market. Let’s dive in and see what really happens under the hood.
What are sneaker and social media bots?
You can find a brief explanation of sneaker bots on my previous article on a similar topic. What sneaker and social media bots are, are tools that provide an easier way of managing different task by automating them with code. Usually what these bots are meant to do is impersonate a legitimate person accessing the web and completing some tasks. To make these bots even more human like companies use residential proxies which provide a genuine IP address for the bot to use.
While sneaker bots are used for direct financial benefit — by buying and selling sneakers at a higher price margin, social media bots are used by businesses to automatically update, post, and configure social media accounts. Proxies come in to play when a single entity needs to manage multiple media accounts, due to the fact that pages like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin or Twitter only allow a certain amount of accounts to be used on a single IP address proxy servers and especially residential proxy servers provide great benefits to the cause.
If you are interested in social media managing bots one of the more popular services is Jarvee, it helps you manage and automate tasks on any of your social media accounts.
Proxy servers for automation of these and similar tasks
You can find many different proxy providers marketing their services precisely for sneaker buying, facebook / twitter / instagram / and other social media account management. These proxies are usually marketed as “the best option” for this specific use case, however what they usually fail to mention is the fact that under the hood these “special” types of proxies are nothing other than a regular residential proxy that requires no additional setup for the user or the provider.
So you might be wondering why would these companies market their products as page specific proxies. Well one of the more obvious reasons is to make their product stand out, the proxy market is big and there are many huge providers offering proxy pools that go well over 50 million proxy counts thus for the small players to stand out they need to present their products as unique benefits to specific use cases, even though the proxy servers they offer have no technical advantages over their competitors.
The only way I can think of that would differentiate these proxy servers as being good for Facebook for example is that the specific pool they offer access to is not blocked by facebook. However most proxy providers (or at least the more reputable ones) usually ask the client what purpose the proxies will be used for and provide proxies that are not blocked by that specific website.
Reputable proxy server providers
So what are the better proxy provider choices for managing social media accounts, buying sneakers or any other online automation tools? Here I will be providing a lost of the providers I had personal experience with, and who have experience in this market:
- Oxylabs.io One of the biggest proxy providers with over 60 million proxies under their belt, also recently launched a self service, thus making the service more accessible to their clients.
Edit: I have found a discount code in one of the coupon pages, so if you use “COUPONIT” you can get 10% discount on residential proxy plans.
- Smartproxy.com This provider recently updated their proxy pool and now has over 40 million proxies in it.
- Netnut.io While the provider has only 500k residential proxies in their pool, it is one of the better ones providing choice of many city / state choices.
I’d like to point out that this is not a review of these providers, those are my personal choices providing good pricing options and having the biggest pool sizes and country selections in this market.
Final thoughts
As a proxy provider it does make sense to market your proxies being “the best” for a specific purpose. However, as a buyer you should not be fooled by these tactics, there are plenty providers to choose from and I only mentioned a couple in this article. Buyers should do their research before committing to one specific provider and look around if there are cheaper options that would satisfy their needs. I hope this article shines some light and provides you with information when choosing the service best for you.
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