End of Survey on Proxy Use + Some Stats
- Published:
If you visited our website during these past few months, you probably noticed a pop-up asking to complete a survey. While the method isn’t ideal from the standpoint of user experience, we wanted to learn more about the needs of our visitors.
And we did! 119 people complete the form, answering questions about their exposure to proxies, preferred proxy types, and deciding factors when choosing a proxy service. We’d like to thank everyone who took part and congratulate the 10 winners of Amazon gift cards. We’ve sent the codes to your email addresses.
A few caveats before we jump into results. The pop-up appeared site-wide, so while we did filter fake and multiple entries, there was little screening done otherwise. And, of course, much of our traffic comes from search engines, so the results may be biased toward popular SEO-oriented pages.
With this in mind, let’s see the data.
Experience in Using Proxies
Predictably, most respondents use proxies on a regular basis, and nearly 20% turn to them for ad-hoc projects.
What we didn’t expect was that around 17% would have no prior exposure to proxies. We’d like to think that we brought people interested in proxy servers. But it’s also possible that some came with an issue whose solution involved proxies (such as wanting to control separate online profiles); or, in most the pessimistic scenario – that they were looking for the fastest way to complete the survey and enter the raffle.
Preferred Proxy Types
Residential proxies turned out to be the preferred proxy type by far. It’s interesting that mobile IPs were the second most popular type by source, followed by ISP addresses. Relatively few respondents chose datacenter proxies, even though they’re still widely used for web scraping.
The respondents also cared about being able to connect through the SOCKS5 protocol with their, presumably, residential proxies.
Most Important Factors When Choosing a Proxy Service
Respondents were able to choose between three and five options.
Connection speed, success rate, and connection stability were the three dominant factors. The first two apply to all proxy servers, while the third factor is especially relevant for those using peer-to-peer proxy networks or publicly available proxies.
Ease of use took a high place too, beating proxy pool size and quality of customer service. On the other hand, the respondents treated company reputation as a relatively unimportant factor when choosing a proxy service.
Conclusion
Judging by the answers, most of our visitors are experienced proxy users who prefer fast and stable residential IPs. Not exactly surprising, but it’s good to confirm it with direct feedback from Proxyway’s visitors.
