If you want to protect yourself when you browse the Internet, you have surely heard terms such as VPN, proxy… but perhaps it is not clear to you what it is, what it is for, what uses or advantages it has. In that case, we explain what a proxy is and how to use it.
If you have heard about them but it is not clear to you what advantages their use has or why it is a good idea to bet on one or how we can get it.
What is a proxy
A proxy or proxy server is a network that works as an intermediary between requests from a client to a server. When we have a proxy on our computer or device, we make the web request through it and it transfers the request to the destination website. It has a series of privacy advantages when we browse the Internet and it is a good option if you want more online requests.
Broadly speaking, the web will not see you connect to that page, but rather it will know the IP address of the proxy, so we will achieve online anonymity and we can skip blocks, as we will see in the advantages explained in the next paragraphs.
Advantages of using a proxy
When using a proxy we get many advantages. The first thing we achieve is to hide the real IP address so we can browse anonymously and we can reduce the digital footprint on the Internet. But hiding our real IP also allows us to bypass geographical blocks if we are in a country where we cannot access certain websites or applications, for example.
We also get other advantages such as greater security when connecting to the Internet, filtering potentially dangerous sites, and we also get higher speed and less loading time than if we don’t use it.
Difference with a VPN
The difference between a proxy and a VPN is that both fulfill the function of protecting us on the Internet. But although both hide our IP address when we connect to the network, there are differences at the level of technical characteristics or how the proxy or VPN hides us. The proxy does not encrypt the connection or the content but only hides the original IP address but the VPN is a more complete solution that creates a tunnel between us and the destination and allows us to protect our connection because it not only hides the IP address but also encrypts the content.
How to use a proxy
We can use a paid proxy service or a free one. The main advantage of the latter is that we will not have to spend money to use them, but we may have more limitations or find more dangers and risks when using them. In addition, we may have to share IP with other users and that carries risks depending on the other person’s use of the address.
But if we want to use a proxy, there are free services that we can use…
free proxies
One of the options is ProxySite, a free service that offers maximum speed and security with SSL encryption and that allows us to choose between more than 25 servers between the United States and the European Union. In addition, it has other advantages such as the possibility of using bypass filters and it is very easy to handle at any level.
Another of the most popular is Hide.me, which has millions of users around the world and which gives us privacy by making the URL expire when we close the browser. It improves the speed of our connection and has a free version, although with quite a few limitations, but we can use it at no cost.
Proxies for Chrome
If we want to use a proxy in the browser, we can also do it with free extensions like Oxylabs Proxy Manager. An extension that we can use free of charge in our browser and that is enough to press a button to activate a proxy that you have enabled. It is not as such a proxy for the browser but we can activate and deactivate it in a simple way and it is compatible with any proxy that we want.
The same happens with Proxy Switcher, which also allows us to have a button on the computer’s navigation bar and we can activate or deactivate it whenever we want, for free and switching between the ones we have as needed.
