Choosing between the HTTP and SOCKS proxies for QuotaGuard Static IP’s

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 you 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, and HTTP client libraries, so it is easy to integrate with your applications. 

SOCKS proxies are a little bit more versatile as they operate at a lower level than HTTP.  

SOCKS proxies can proxy TCP connections to 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).

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:

Please let us know if you still have questions about which proxy to chose for your use case. Our customer support contact information is below and we'd love to help you out with finalizing this crucial decision.