Over the past year we've been working diligently on the proxycheck.io service adding new features and improving the responsiveness and reliability of the API. We've updated the appearance of the website several times and fleshed out the dashboard.

We feel now is the perfect time to launch our blog so we can better reach out to you and provide greater insight into our new features and future plans. We have a great roadmap ahead, the service is performing well and we're fully committed to proxycheck.io and to you.

Firstly, we want to allay some fears that the service is going to turn paid-only or that we're going to segment features between free and paid tiers. We don't believe that a paid-only model for this kind of service is viable. Instead, we believe that the best way to go is a free model with extra paid options for people that need more queries for commercial usage.

Feature segmentation is also not something we feel necessary at this time. Every user, be them on our free or paid tiers, should have access to TLS/SSL encrypted queries, powerful statistics, query tagging and white/black lists. These features are fundamental to the usage of the API; to only allow paying customers to utilise them would make the service inherently less effective.

Similarly, our free and paying users both enjoy full access to our entire cluster, as we do not differentiate between them. Some competitors' services restrict access to multi-server technology, which means free users are treated as second class, Furthermore, should there be any kind of server issue, they may lose access to the API temporarily, whereas our customers wouldn't.

The final thing I wanted to discuss was our unique technology. Everything we use has been built from the ground up by us. That includes the API technology, the website, our dashboard features, and even the cluster architecture that our servers utilise.

We were looking around for cluster technology we could make use of. However, we found all of them a bit too complicated with a lot of code debt, and many of them are also operating system specific.

With our custom architecture we maintain mirrored databases and files through a constant in process syncing system. If any node in our cluster goes offline, it is instantly kicked from service. It only rejoins once it has re-synced and been tested for coherency by the rest of our cluster members.

At the moment we expose two nodes within our cluster for the API to use but we have a third redundant node in the cluster which is not exposed. As the service grows and we receive more paying customers, we will be expanding the number of nodes in the cluster which will enhance proxycheck.io's availability and performance.

I hope this first blog post was enlightening and interesting. If you would like to discuss anything please feel free to message us on Skype, iMessage or Email via [email protected].

Thanks!