When it comes to hiding your IP address online, there are various ways to do that. Among the many ways to hide your IP address, there are two popular ways, namely web proxy and VPN. Both have generally the same function, but VPN offers more advantages in protecting your online privacy.
When compared to VPN, web proxies might allow you to reach the goal of protecting your identity while browsing on the internet, but it only offers the basic protection system. Moreover, there are some disadvantages of web proxy that make the virtual private network to be a better solution for online privacy protection. Here are the disadvantages of web proxy when compared to the virtual private network:
1. It Only Offers The Basic Privacy Protection
When you use the web proxy, you only have the protection for your IP address. It is considered a basic privacy protection since most VPN services offer this feature as their core service. Moreover, this protection can only be applied when you access the websites via the proxy site. If you open a new tab in your browser or use any application on your operating system, you won’t get the same privacy protection for your IP address. Thus, the protection offered by the web proxy is quite limited, and it is quite basic without offering any advanced features for the users.
2. You Need To Access The Web Proxy Site To Use The Proxy
When using the proxy site to bypass the internet restrictions, you are actually accessing the target websites via the proxy site. For instance, if you want to access Reddit when Reddit is blocked in your country, you need to first go to the proxy site and then enter the Reddit URL from there in order to be able to access it. Moreover, the Reddit website that you access will act as a frame under the web proxy’s URL. So, it is quite impractical to use since if you are using VPN, you simply enter the URL of your destination website without having to visit any proxy site first.
3. Not All Websites Can Be Fully Accessed
Usually, web proxies are good only for light browsing, and also, it is only good to be used for basic entertainment. You might still be able to access YouTube and stream the videos on YouTube without any problem even when your government blocks YouTube. However, for other websites, you might not be able to do the same. Moreover, web proxies are not good to be used for websites that require you to log into your account in order to use the website fully. So, there are limitations that you need to deal with when using the web proxies, unlike VPN that gives you the full access to any blocked websites.
4. Limited Servers Are Available For The Proxy
While VPN might offer you with lots of countries to choose from as your private IP address, the web proxies will usually only offer limited servers on limited locations. For instance, it might only offer the US server for the users, albeit they might offer a number of server locations in the US. All in all, the web proxy that you use might not be able to bypass region-protected content properly unless you can find the one that offers various server locations around the world.
5. It Usually Has Bad Performance
Since the web proxies are usually offered for free, and there are many people using the servers at the same time, you can’t expect these private servers to provide the best performance for you. Most of the time, the common problems experienced when using a web proxy is the bad gateway, buffering, failed stream, and other problems that might make the overall experience bad. On the other hand, VPN services can give you the best server performance that ensures you can stream or download your desired content in full speed without interruptions.
Those are the disadvantages of web proxy when compared to the virtual private network. In many aspects, VPN is always the best choice of privacy protection tool that you can use to hide your IP address, as well as keep your online activity anonymous all the time. It can also be applied system-wide, meaning that you can always encrypt the network connection in all of your devices.