Keep Your Browsing Private with a Proxy Server

A proxy server sits between you and the web, so sites see the proxy’s IP address rather than your device, which helps mask your identity and reduce tracking. While logs on the proxy can still exist, this setup is enough for many users to dodge basic profiling and ad surveillance.

Many providers also bundle VPN products that add encryption and stronger endpoint security, so heavy privacy users or businesses often combine proxies with VPNs rather than using a proxy alone.

Best Paid Proxy Services

Paid proxy networks focus on reliability, success rates, geographic coverage, and customer support, which matter for scraping, brand protection, and enterprise security workloads. Below are the main providers and what they do best.

1. Smartproxy

Smartproxy offers more than 40 million residential IPs across about 195 locations, with unlimited threads and convenient browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Plans start around $75 per month for 5 GB, with popular tiers giving lower per‑GB pricing as usage scales.

The dashboard lets you choose rotating or sticky sessions and filter gateways by country or city, which makes Smartproxy a strong value pick for budget‑conscious scraping and ad verification.

2. Luminati (Bright Data)

Luminati, now Bright Data, runs a proxy pool of more than 72 million IPs and supports residential, static residential, mobile, and data center options with granular location and ASN targeting. Its Proxy Manager lets you tune rotation rules, blacklist IPs, and optimize bandwidth across HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5.

Pricing is more complex and generally higher than mid‑market rivals, but large enterprises and highly specific targeting workloads often justify the premium.

3. RSocks

RSocks provides residential, data center, and mobile proxies from a pool of more than 3 million IPs, with unlimited bandwidth and up to 500 concurrent threads on many plans. Instead of bandwidth‑based tiers, it offers dozens of plan variants tuned to rotation intervals, locations, and proxy counts.

Its pause feature, proxy checker tool, and support for HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 make it attractive for flexible, cost‑controlled use, though geo‑targeting is more limited than top‑end providers.

4. Oxylabs

Oxylabs runs more than 70 million residential IPs plus about 2 million data center IPs, with SOCKS5 support for static residential and data center ranges and AI‑assisted “next‑gen” residential proxies that better mimic human browsing. Rotating gateways support country, city, and ASN targeting.

Pricing starts near $300 per month for 20 GB and scales down to roughly $5 per GB at high volume, which positions Oxylabs strongly for enterprise scraping and large‑scale data extraction.

5. Storm Proxies

Storm Proxies concentrates on small users with cheap rotating residential, backconnect, and private dedicated proxies, all with unlimited bandwidth. Pools are smaller, roughly tens of thousands of IPs, with basic regional targeting across the US and EU.

Its pricing model, where plans are based on IP counts or simultaneous connections rather than traffic, makes it a popular choice for sneaker copping and individual scraping tasks.

Paid Proxy Services Comparison

This snapshot highlights how the main paid providers compare on price, bandwidth, and performance for common workloads.

Best Free Proxy Servers

Free web proxies help with quick, low‑risk tasks like bypassing simple geo‑blocks or testing setups, but they rarely match paid options for security, uptime, or support. Here are the main services and where they fit.

1. Hidester

Hidester’s browser‑based proxy requires no signup or software and lets you route traffic through US or European servers, with options to encrypt URLs, strip scripts, and manage cookies. The provider states it does not keep logs and controls its own servers.

2. VPNBook

VPNBook offers a free SSL web proxy with endpoints in the US, UK, France, and Canada, delivering fast performance and automatic blocking of ads and some scripts. It keeps weblogs for about a week to handle abuse reports, then deletes them.

3. Hide.me

Hide.me runs a fast free proxy with browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox and servers in the Netherlands, Germany, and Finland, plus paid VPN tiers for more features. The free proxy shows pop‑up ads promoting its VPN but does not retain logs.

4. KProxy

KProxy provides a browser service, extensions, and a portable Firefox bundle, making it handy on locked‑down machines in offices or schools. The free tier limits sessions to around three hours or about 300 MB before a cooldown window.

5. Hide My Ass (HMA)

HMA’s free web proxy supports city‑level routing through locations like New York, Seattle, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Prague, with URL encryption options. It logs IPs and visited URLs for roughly 30 days, which trades off some privacy for convenience.

Free Proxy Services Comparison

This table lines up the main free providers on locations, features, limitations, and logging policies.

What Is a Proxy?

A proxy is an intermediary server that forwards your requests to websites, so targets see the proxy’s IP instead of yours, adding a layer between your device and the internet. Data center proxies use IPs from hosting providers, while residential proxies use IPs assigned by ISPs to real households.

Data center proxies tend to be faster and cheaper but easier to detect, whereas residential proxies better imitate real users, offer higher anonymity, and cost more, especially at scale.

Proxy Types Comparison

Proxies can be classified by origin (data center vs residential) and by access model (shared, semi‑dedicated, dedicated), each with trade‑offs in cost, speed, and ban risk.

What Are Proxies Used For?

Individuals use proxies to bypass geo‑blocks, find better prices (such as region‑based flight fares), and add basic privacy by encrypting or rerouting web requests. Businesses rely on rotating proxies to crawl competitor sites, monitor reviews, and collect pricing and product data without hitting IP‑based blocks.

Other enterprise uses include filtering malicious email links, scanning for counterfeit listings and brand abuse, and enforcing security policies by routing outbound traffic through managed gateways.

Proxy Use Cases and Recommended Providers

Paid Proxies Versus Free Proxies

Free proxies are fine for occasional browsing and low‑risk testing, but they often come with weaker security, higher downtime, limited locations, and unclear data handling, which can expose you to tracking or even identity theft. Paid providers, by contrast, operate under contracts, SLAs, and support guarantees that matter for business and automation use.

When choosing a provider, prioritize reliability, IP pool size and geo‑spread, success rates above roughly 90%, clear documentation and integrations, and transparent pricing, especially if you plan to scale scraping or security workloads.

The Future of Proxies

Market research forecasts the proxy server space will grow from around $3.4 billion in 2023 to roughly $7.2 billion by 2031, with data center proxies alone expected to reach multi‑billion valuations as scraping and automation expand. AI and machine learning are already being used to mimic human behavior, route traffic intelligently, and bypass increasingly aggressive anti‑bot defenses.

At the same time, security reports warn that misconfigured proxies factor into a large share of breaches, pushing organizations toward zero‑trust models and tighter policy enforcement at the proxy layer.

Latest Research and Studies on Proxy Services

Recent reports and award roundups highlight Oxylabs, Bright Data, and newer players like SOAX as leading enterprise providers with success rates above 99% on many benchmark scraping tasks. Other studies show residential proxies can halve block rates on e‑commerce sites compared with data center IPs alone.

Security and cloud statistics underline that a significant portion of incidents involve exposed or misused proxy and gateway infrastructure, while AI‑focused outlooks predict automated proxy routing and detection will become standard capabilities throughout 2025 and beyond.