“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

Every day millions of people around the world use free proxy services to hide their location, improve online security or access websites that aren’t available in their country. It’s easy to think that everything on the internet is free to use but what we tend to forget is that there is always someone who is paying for online services, in some way or another. When you use a free proxy server, you’re essentially surrendering your own IP address to the proxy server for the privilege of using their IP address. This makes you “anonymous” to the websites you’re visiting but not to the proxy server. Here are 5 reasons why should stop using free proxies and start looking for alternatives:

1. Most free proxy servers don’t pass security tests

It has been found that most free proxy servers don’t allow HTTPS connection, which is a huge security problem. HTTPS is a protocol for securing the communication between two systems which encrypts and decrypts user page requests as well as the pages that are returned by the Web server. The lack of HTTPS means your connection to the server is not encrypted, so someone monitoring the connection could easily see the data you’re sending as it travels through the network. This makes free proxy services a very poor choice for doing anything that requires privacy, such as entering your login details into a website.

2. Your connection can be monitored

The reason why free proxy websites avoid using HTTPS is that they might want to monitor your activities themselves.
When you use a free proxy website, you’re trusting the owners and expecting quality service for free. But do you know the real intentions behind offering free proxy server? There’s no way to know what the server owners installed on their hardware to monitor you, so before trying it, think if it worth taking the risk.

3. It can steal cookies

When you log into a server, your computer creates a small file called a cookie. This is a very useful feature because it stores your login data, so you don’t have to keep logging in every time you visit the site. However, when a proxy server is between you and the website, there’s a chance the owners of the server can steal the cookies. They could use them to impersonate you online and make a lot of damage. If you visited very sensitive sites, you might be in big trouble.

4. A free proxy server can contain malware

By trusting your connection to a free proxy server, you’re hoping that it won’t abuse the connection to infect your device. However, a free proxy server can infect your machine accidentally. Due to their service being free, some owners rely on ad revenue. They inject advertisements into the content and hope that you’ll click them and help pay for the server. Unfortunately, if they aren’t diligent, scammers take advantage of it and show ads laced with malware. This type of advertising is known as malvertising. The owners likely won’t even know this is happening until your computer has been infected.

5. Poor service

After you take the risk of using free proxies, you’ll probably find it not worth the risk. Due to lack of funding and because so many other people are using them, free proxies are typically very slow. You may find the most proxies of certain countries are either blocked or not working. Also, all of these free proxy providers do not have 24/7 customer support so they will not be able to help you in any case.
If you really have to use free proxies, never submit any personal information across it. It’s best to imagine a hacker reading every piece of information you send over a free proxy server. If this makes you uneasy about using the server, it’s best to stay well away!

Are there better alternatives?

Well, as I already said, there is nothing for free. Every decent service has its price and it’s better to pay that price when you know it, so you don’t regret it later. Good thing that competitive proxy market made prices affordable to everyone. Here is my top 3 proxy providers, who can offer you either residential proxies or datacenter proxies:

1. Smartproxy.com

The service that nicely surprised me. Not only it has over 10 million residential IP addresses that are going through real mobile and desktop proxy networks over the world, but they also offer unlimited connections and threads on top of that. You can choose country-level targeting and decide between using a random proxy that rotates your IP address with every request or sticky proxy, which would change your IP every 10 minutes. Smartproxy pricing model is based on subscription with data consumption limits — you can also get a 20% discount with my code “SMARTCOUPON”. Their technical support is available 24/7 and answers within a few minutes. it is simple to understand and easy to work with. Also, they offer a 3-day money-back guarantee. If you want to get more information about Smartproxy residential proxies, you can read this review.

1. StormProxies.com

Another great proxy that defies the odds of being banned. Over the years, StormProxies has turned into a generalist proxy provider, with services that cover a broad range of needs and requests. They are now offering rotating proxies and dedicated proxies. They do have around 70 thousand IP addresses, which is not as impressive as the other services in my top. However, StormProxies offers a 48-hour money-back guarantee. So you can easily test their proxies first to see if they’re really for you, without risking any investment. All packages allow you access to a pool of 70K private dedicated IPs. These IP addresses can be changed with every HTTP request, every 3 minutes or every 15 minutes.

1. Microleaves.com

With 26 million IP addresses that consist of real homes and real people, Microleaves is one of the biggest proxy networks in the market. They are providing backconnect proxies, dedicated proxies, and shared proxies. Their backconnect proxies are known for changing IP addresses every 5 minutes, which is good for crawling and data mining. Microleaves service offers a wide variety of subscription plans for every need. However, they are limited by threads and that might seem not flexible in some use cases. Microleaves offer 3-day money-back guarantee and have 24/7 customer support.

Free proxies are a convenient way to skip around country restrictions on the internet or surf anonymously. The non-existent price tag, however, means that proxy server owners feel more obligated to make a profit off of you and your details. My suggestion — avoid free proxy servers and invest in your security. Your personal data is priceless.