A Brief Overview of Proxy Sites and Why They Make Excellent Choices for the Savvy Web Surfers
You may have heard about proxy sites and wonder why anyone would need a proxy to surf the World Wide Web. In essence a proxy site is a web page that lets you hide your real IP address when visiting any site on the Internet. An anonymous proxy server is a special server that lets the users hide their own IP address, thus disabling any malicious third part that plans to unauthorized access to your computer for different purposes.
There are many reasons why people use proxy to surf the web. Letfs look at some of them.
Security
It is very dangerous to surf the World Wide Web naked i.e. exposing your real IP address due to some very obvious reasons. You can put yourself vulnerable to malicious attacks to your computer with the primary intent to create damage or losses in the form of virus infiltration, or gaining access to private data such as your identity and credit card information.
Privacy
It is disheartening to know that without the use of proxies other people can get to know your surfing habits and the pages that you actually visit! The use of Proxy servers totally eliminates the fear of another party tracking your movements on the World Wide Web. These would mean the ultimate intrusion to your privacy and should be avoided at all cost. Using a proxy makes sure you have access to al of your favorite sites and be able to surf them worry-free knowing that you are well hidden under the mask of your proxy address.
Geographical Boundaries
There are some sites that offers only access to users from a certain geographical area. With the use of proxy you can now surf those sites that were inaccessible in the past. In fact, you can appear to arrive as someone from a different location depending on the proxy IP server you decide to use at the moment.
Speed
Proxy servers lets you surf the internet with more speed as these servers accumulate and saves files that are most frequently requested by the users in a special database known as the gcacheh. Therefore surfing the web by accessing these cache files would mean faster downloads and faster transmitting time between your computer and the site of interest.
Free vs. Pay Proxy Servers
Basically, there are there types of proxy servers can be used to achieve this effect. The first are free proxy servers that can be accessed by anyone and used without any charges incurred. These are great for normal Internet activity that does not require rigorous security measures such as web surfing for pleasure and social activities on various web 2.0 sites. The biggest problem would most of these types of servers are not 100% anonymous! There is no guarantee that there will be no leak of information and sometimes these servers can be inaccessible due to unexpected downtime. However there may be some effective proxies around that may be suitable for your own use.
Paid proxy servers would make excellent choices for these looking to utilize total anonymity when involved in commercial based activity such as sending mass emails, researching competitors websites located on a server that restricts access from your geographical area and activities that requires fast transmission access and speed.
