Semi-Dedicated Proxies: What Are They?

Semi-dedicated proxies for business use

When choosing the right proxies for business, semi-dedicated proxies can suit as a happy medium for smaller projects. This type of proxies may be a great option for those who need more capabilities than shared proxies can provide but do not need resources for data operations on a large scale. As semi-dedicated proxies cost less than private ones, you get a higher-grade product for an accessible price that allows you to experiment and to level up with more capabilities.

While heavy-duty data extraction processes call for higher requirements, the resources need to be top-notch and ensure the highest performance and speed metrics. Unfortunately, semi-dedicated proxies cannot guarantee such capabilities and stay as an option for less complex use cases. 

Benefits of semi-dedicated proxies

We have already mentioned the value of semi-dedicated proxies as a favorable compromise between shared and private proxies. Now it is time to dig deeper and indicate the main benefits of these proxies:

• Less expensive. Selling the same proxies for a few users allows proxy providers to suggest lower prices for their services. This makes semi-dedicated proxies a cost-effective option compared to private proxies. From a user’s perspective, it can be explained this way: imagine you are buying a premium product and pay the full price by yourself. As opposed to this situation, you can share the purchase with your few friends and split the costs, making it a win-win case.   

• Support HTTP and SOCKS protocols. Actually, it depends on a proxy type and not on its shared or dedicated nature. However, if a private proxy supports HTTP/SOCKS protocols and becomes shared among several users, it still maintains the same capabilities.

• More stable than shared proxies. Unlike shared proxies, semi-dedicated proxies provide access to the same IP address only to a small group of users. Since the IP is being used not as many times, the level of business performance increases.

• Bypass geographic restrictions. It is important to clarify that this benefit applies to all types of proxies despite their shared or private nature. Just like dedicated proxies, semi-dedicated proxies also allow users to get around geo constraints and browse the web from a specified location. For instance, SEO specialists can scrape localized SERP data. They simply choose a proxy for the country they want to access: Brazil proxy for Brazil, Germany proxy for Germany, etc. Proxies used for SEO purposes are often referred to as SEO proxies.

Although semi-dedicated proxies bring some advantages, their efficiency mostly depends on the user needs and the reliability of the service provider.

Challenges of using semi-dedicated proxies

While semi-dedicated proxies can be a great choice for many use cases, one might consider other types of proxies due to such reasons: 

• The bad neighbor effect. This term refers to a situation when sharing the same IP address even with a few other users may cause risk in terms of reliability. For instance, if another user is being flagged, you might also suffer the consequences, like getting blocked or slowed down.

• Lower performance. While private proxies provide dedicated access to the IP, sharing the bandwidth may affect performance metrics. Of course, it mostly depends on the user’s needs, so this aspect goes as a thing to keep in mind when choosing a proxy type.

• Unsuitable for large-scale projects. Heavy-duty data collection requires the best resources as well as performance capabilities. For this reason, we suggest using private proxies for the large web scraping operations.

Professionals choose private proxies

Semi-dedicated proxies still carry some drawbacks of shared proxies and may not be fully suitable for business use. For this reason, choosing private proxies over the shared or semi-dedicated ones allows users to accurately capture publicly available information from the most challenging targets on the internet.  

Main advantages of using private proxies:

• High proxy speeds. As private proxies are assigned to be used by a single user, the traffic is unlimited and does not risk to be exceeded. For example, our Datacenter Proxies are extremely fast and offer high uptime since each proxy is assigned to one user at a time.

• Stable and secure. One of the main advantages of private proxies is that they are dedicated to one user only, and nobody shares them at the same time. The total ownership of a proxy ensures a higher level of stability.

• Perfect for large-scale web scraping projects. “Large-scale” measure implies that there will be a large bandwidth and traffic requirements. For this reason, it is advisable to use private proxies to perform heavy-duty data acquisition operations that require the scraping process to be fast and reliable. While the cost may be higher for private proxies compared to shared or semi-dedicated proxies, the perks are totally worth it. 

• Unlimited targets. Private proxies can be used for very specific business needs and help to gather publicly available data from the most challenging targets. 

Wrapping up

Semi-dedicated proxies may serve as a compromise for those who want a cheaper option and expect better performance. And yet, choosing private proxies over shared ones might be the right choice for businesses operating large-scale data-gathering operations. Check out our dedicated IP vs shared IP article for more information.
If you also want to learn more about the ecosystem of proxies, the article discussing the difference between datacenter and residential proxies is a great start. And if you are considering which type of proxies suits your business needs, read about planning a scraping project and find out some useful tips!