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Comparison of VPN and Proxy

· 4 min read
Gregory Komissarov

I'll bring tougether answers to the popular questions like "what Proxy types I can face and why I should choose them over VPN".

Summary​

Both option works to change you public internet IP address. If you want to scrape data from the public internet, then paid HTTP proxies will be your best choice. They are easy to use, flexible in configuration, scalable, and affordable(TBD write how to choose the proper proxy type)

Long version

Proxy - Historical excursion​

I’ll describe key differences and usage scenarios for the VPN and Proxy in 2024 with a short historical intro.

You can see that one of the most popular open-source proxy servers(Squid) started its history in the last decade of the previous century, more than 27 years ago. Meanwhile, some of the tasks it was designed to solve are still relevant:

Provide access to the client from a private network to the public internet.​

IPv6 is still not the most popular protocol on the network layer of the internet and we are using Ipv4. This means that there are not enough public addresses for all internet users and your ISP provider has to solve it by translating your private address(address in your Wi-Fi network) to his public address(the address WEB sites see when reaching them).

Reduce traffic and bandwidth consumption.​

It was extremely helpful 20 years ago but is still used by some schools, universities, etc. If you can download some public content like images, CSS, JS, media files, etc once and share it with the clients infinitely(to cache it) - you can decrease your company, school, whatever traffic from 10 to 100 times. It was essential in those days.

Security​

Generating cyber security literacy is far from perfect, so one of the last businesses and governments to protect people by making some content unavailable: WEB sites that share malware files and try to still your cookies.

As you can see, it all started with a desire to provide people efficient and secure access to the Internet, and IP address change was just a side effect.

Proxy - Nowadays​

  • You might heard about reverse proxy - this is server-side technology to allows WEB clients to connect to one server, forward traffic to another one, and process requests there.

  • There are anonymous proxies, and their main task is to make it harder to identify you. Vendors are saying that they do not store access logs, and might not have authentication(login and password), and of course, they are changing your visible IP address. You can build a proxy chain to hide one proxy after another, but don’t have any illusions, you still can be found.

  • CASB(Cloud access security brokers) - enterprise-grade technology that conducts all employee traffic through a proxy to authenticate and authorize them, apply access policies, and mitigate security risks(data leakage, etc)

  • Web scraping proxies - The main purpose is to provide you public IP address in GEO regions you need with IP quality(characteristics visible to IP DBs) and the amount you require to access data. (TBD write about differences in IP characteristics and how to choose the proper one)

  • Transparent proxy - aka “forced proxy”, can be installed w/o the client will w/o any changes on his/her side. It routes your outgoing HTTP/HTTPS traffic on a router through a proxy server. Used by businesses and governments for security needs.

  • CGI proxy - Desired to provide access to proxy for clients that can't use proxy protocols. It's just a WEB page with addr http://xyz.com where you type a target website addr http://abc.com into the submission form and it shows it to you right into the original website page. Totally insecure to pass any credentials or cookies.

VPN​

You can read mo//re about VPN itself here and there. The ability to connect multiple sites(corporate networks) and provide secure access to the company infrastructure is out of the scope of this article and might be a blog(let me know if you are interested).

Talking about individuals, usage patterns and values are next:

  • Access GEO-restricted content(video streaming, tickets, car driving test booking, etc) by changing your publicly visible IP address.

  • Encrypt all your traffic when you are using untrusted networks(cafe wifi, etc). This will eliminate the risk of captured traffic description by attackers (till the CPU revolutionary improves).

I do not recommend you to use a VPN for WEB scrapping cause you won't be able to do tens of thousands of independent HTTP requests with unique settings like GEO, session, timeout, etc. Even in smaller amounts, it’s not so handy to configure it compare to the HTTP Proxy.