Using a different IP address has its benefits. For one, you do not have to expose your IP address which can be linked o your location or even identity. Secondly, with a mock IP address you can sometimes get details from a site that was not meant for your location. Lastly, of course, changing IP address can protect you against some kinds on online attacks. So how to change your IP Address?
The IP address is very similar to a postal address. Using the house number, street number, city and pin code one can locate the exact house. Similarly using four dotted decimal numbers, any computer connected online can be located. This is very important for successful communication over the internet. The each dotted decimal number can range from 0 – 255. This gives ample IP addresses to connect all the computers online.
Now coming back to changing your IP address, there are two options that you can use. The CGI proxy and the Change IP proxy solutions are quite popular and widely used alternatives. In both the solutions, the primary request from your computer first goes to the proxy. This manipulates the request and forwards it to the internet and in the process hides your real IP address.
The CGI/Web proxy is typically a dummy IP address which hosts the same content as the real IP Address. So if you want to access a particular server which is restricted in your organization, you would look for its web proxy. Since the proxy IP address is not restricted, you can get access to all the contents from the server through the proxy.
If you were to browse links from this proxy webpage, even those would be routed through the proxy. Thus you are able to browse the web anonymously. The CGI proxies are typically targeted towards web browsing alone. They do not provide the ability to change your IP address for other applications.
The proxy servers are the first point of contact for the computers. The main reason for using proxies was to speed up the web browsing experience. The most common pages regularly accessed as cached in the proxy server which allows quick access for the computers requesting that service.
This process actually leads to another important benefit with proxy servers. Since all the requests are routed through the proxy server, they can change the IP address of the requests to hide the real IP address. So the local computers will always connect to the internet over a different IP address from their real one.
There are different levels of anonymity provided with these servers. The full anonymity means that others will not know that you are using a proxy and at the same time you can fake your IP address. The transparent one changes the request fields but not the IP address. Thus the proxy server delivers a more comprehensive solution to change IP address than CGI proxy.
