Smartproxy is a rotating residential proxy network which enables users to gather any data from the web using a pool of over 5 million proxies.
Use cases for the rotating residential proxy network.
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People wont pay $60 usd a month.
Looking at your privacy policy it's pretty average too.
Shitty offering imo, your customer base is probably more so aligned to shady forums - not ozbargain.
For most people https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ VPN at $69.95 USD per two years will be much better value and deliver the same outcome.
This was the message I received from reporting this deal.
This is a common tool used by price comparison sites and also recommended to OzBargain to help preventing having our thumbnail system from being blocked at random.
A bit weird that OzBargain is relying on residential IP to retrieve thumbnails.
More and more sites are blocking VPN providers from connecting to their public services. It doesn't surprise me that things like PIA isn't enough. I'm a big user of PIA and have noticed a lot more blocks to the service over the last year.
I won't name the site (popular comparison site on OzBargain) but they are using this service or perhaps a competitor to scrape retailer sites for prices. As for the thumbnail tool, we don't use a proxy but our server keeps getting blocked and we are unable to take screenshots on numerous sites now. A proxy service like may alleviate this issue but we're going down the path of just having static thumbnails for blocked stores.
Point being, this service can have multiple uses. Just like VPNs, Newsgroup Providers etc.
deliver the same outcome.
You're not going to be able to harvest keywords or deliver SEO spam.
Expensive
The first question I'd ask is have you legally obtained access to these 5 million proxies?
The second is do the owners over these connections given explicit consent (not we've tricked gotten them to install some software and as such they've agreed to us hijacking their connection is buried in the T&C's)?
Yet another shit harvested proxy service. Definitely not legally obtained with consent.
Backdoors/botnet (as others have said).
No terms of service that I could find…
Botnet?