Choose HTTP / SOCKS5 Proxies for Your Static IP

With every QuotaGuard Static plan, you have the option of using our HTTP or SOCKS5 proxies.

This article outlines the differences and what factors should influence your decision between the two proxies.

HTTP vs SOCKS Comparison

The majority of our customers use our HTTP proxy. This allows them to route any HTTP calls via our proxy – including secure requests over HTTPS.

HTTP proxies are natively supported in most of the common programming languages, as well as, their HTTP client libraries. This makes it is easy to integrate HTTP proxies within your applications.

On the other hand, SOCKS proxies are a little bit more versatile as they operate at a lower OSI level than HTTP proxies.

SOCKS proxies can proxy TCP connections to an arbitrary IP addresses. This allows you to proxy higher level protocol interactions like FTP or LDAP.

SOCKS is also supported at the socket level in a lot of the major languages. However, most client libraries do not natively support it, which makes it a bit harder to integrate easily in to your application(s).

Recommendation

Due to the ease of integration, if you are accessing an HTTP or HTTPS API, you should probably use our HTTP proxy.

If you are using a different protocol, then we recommend that you should switch to using SOCKS proxies.

These are some of the more common use cases that we see for each type of proxy:

Common HTTP Use Cases

   Accessing an HTTP API

   Accessing an HTTPS API

Common SOCKS Use Cases

   Accessing an MySQL database

   Accessing an LDAP service

   Transferring files via Secure FTP

Please reach out to Support if you still have questions about which proxy type to chose for your particular use case.