WHAT IS A PROXY

INFORMATION

Proxies are what a keyboard is to a PC, what pen is to paper, what gas is to a car, what bullets is to a gun. They are a peripheral to a bot. For most, if not all sites you will need proxies in order to effectively bot. There are many types of proxies, there are many uses for proxies and it can be extremely confusing to a beginner. So in this guide we will go through what proxies are. This whole category will hopefully bring you from little to no proxy knowledge, to understanding what each type proxy does, how to use them, why you need to use them and a whole lot more.

WHAT ARE THEY?

We will try not to get into the deepest of details when it comes to proxies as that tends to confuse people. A proxy is essentially something that your router connects to, then the proxy connects to the site you are botting. Proxies are essential for botting as they enable a botter to do a multitude of things which we will talk about next. We feel we need to get the uses of proxies out the way before we can talk more in depth.

USE OF PROXY #1

One of the main uses of proxies is enabling the botter to run multiple tasks on your bots. Think of each task as a person on google chrome opening up the website you are trying to bot, finding the product, adding it to cart, filling in all your details and attempting to checkout x item. If you have multiple tasks, lets say 5, without using proxies the site you are botting is going to see that 5 tasks coming from the same IP address are sending a bunch of requests to the site at the same time. The site will pick up on this and ban that IP address. This happens when someone is running too many tasks on what botters call "local host". Your local host is essentially your home IP address. If you are running tasks on your local host that means each task will use your home IP address to bot the site.

Most if not all sites will pick up on this as they will identify that there is no way a human could send this many requests in such as short amount of time. This is why its recommended to only run a few tasks on your local host. Now for most sites running 1 or 2 tasks is not going to get you very far. In some cases such as Shopify it is actually a good idea to keep your setup simple and only run a few tasks using your local host as it is much faster than proxies and as each task will require a captcha if your running too many tasks it can be hard to manage. However that is just Shopify, basically all other site types will require a large quantity of task in order to be botted efficiently.

This is where the first use of proxies come in. Each proxy is basically a different IP address. So let's go back to our example of 5 tasks. If you have 5 proxies and you run 5 tasks meaning each task is using 1 proxy. As we said each proxy will have a different IP address meaning the site you are botting is going to see 5 requests coming from 5 different IP addresses and just assume that it is 5 different people trying to checkout on their site. The site will not know its coming from the same person as all they will see is the 5 different IP addresses which they will not be able to link together. The first use of proxies is anonymity and allowing a higher quantity of task.

USE OF PROXY #2

Proxies are not just used to allow you to run more tasks. Sometimes sites will decline multiple orders coming from the same IP address. For example say the site states that the product you are trying to purchase is 'Limited to one pair per person' (which is very common for hyped products) the site may look at the IP's associated with the orders. Lets say you cop 3 pairs, all on the same IP (local host) they may see this and cancel 2 or sometimes all of them as they have all come from the same IP. This means using a proxy can essentially bypass this.

Instead of 3 orders on the same IP, if you were using proxies they would see one order on 1 IP (111.111.111.111) another order on a different IP (222.222.222.222) and another order on a different IP (333.333.333.333) this means they would not decline the orders because they are not on the same IP, they will just think its 3 different people. Now there are other factors such as multiple orders on the same address/card but that's for a different guide

TYPES OF PROXIES

There are 3 main types of proxies, each have different uses but most importantly they "look" different to the site you are botting. They all have negatives and positives compared to each other so we highly recommend you read over the next guide TYPES OF PROXY to get a better understanding.

SPEED

For most sites you will bot the aim of the game is ultimate speed. When you don't use proxies your local host simply connects straight to the site. When you throw a proxy into the mix your local host has to connect to the proxy, then the proxy has to connect to the site. This drastically slows down the whole process so to avoid this you want to seek out proxies which are extremely fast. However 1 proxy may not exactly be "faster" than another. You have to bring location into the mix which we will talk about next.

Here we can see an example on what role proxies play in terms of anonymity and speed. As we can see, Task 1 is not using a proxy, the task is using the botters local host meaning it is directly sending requests to the sites server, no proxy in-between. The website sees this request coming from the botters local host with the example IP address of 123.123.123.123. The speed is extremely quick as the local host does not need to "stop by" a proxy on the way. If we have too many tasks using local host the site we are botting is going to see multiple requests from the exact same IP and ban or throttle that IP address as discussed earlier in this guide.

Task 2 is using a proxy and we can see that the speed overall is much slower. Task 1 has a total speed of just 10 milliseconds whereas Task 2, which is using a proxy has a total speed of 510ms. By no means are these measurements correct, it is just there to give you a general idea of the speed. A 500 millisecond difference may not seem like much, and its not, but as we said these numbers are meant to give you a general idea. We can also see the website does not see the botters local host IP, it only sees the proxy IP and as we mentioned each proxy will be a different IP address even if we had 1000 tasks all using proxies the site would just think it is 1000 different people and would not be able to ban anyone. Little do they know its all coming from you.

BANNING

Sites are always trying to combat bots, they deploy multiple different techniques to slow down or stop botters one of which is proxy filtering / proxy protection. Sites are aware botters use proxies so they try to ban as many as they can. Some proxy types will work better on some sites compared to others and they all have different benefits and negatives for each site. In the next guide TYPES OF PROXY we hope to explain this for each.