This year has been giant for us at proxycheck, we added lots of new features and dramatically overhauled our service, website and API. Below we'd like to share with you all the changes that happened this year.

Outreach

• We started this company blog that you're currently reading
• We started a GitHub account featuring PHP client code
• We started a Twitter account and have been tweeting new features
• We created a new contact us page with live chat support

API

• We greatly decreased query latency through code refactoring
• We added query tagging support
• We built an Inference Engine to discover new proxies and to curate our existing data
• We created 20 honeypots positioned around the world to capture malicious activity to further feed our Inference Engine
• We vastly improved our VPN detection
• We added support for VPN detection in IPv6 address ranges
• We vastly improved our ASN flag support which now also supports IPv6 alongside IPv4

Website

• Website gained a new look with drop-shadows, subtle animations and vibrant colours
• A top navigation bar was added and tab bars were placed on some pages
• We added a Pricing page and overhauled the Web Interface page
• We completely remade the Service Status page
• We made the website more mobile friendly with media queries
• We remade the API Documentation page which now features dashboard API examples under a new tab
• We significantly improved our Code Examples page with examples added for python, node.js, C# and Ruby
• We added Stats, Whitelist and Blacklist features to the Customer Dashboard

Payments

• We switched from one time yearly payments to monthly and yearly subscriptions (which you can cancel at any time)
• We expanded our plan sizes into lower and higher priced plans (plans from just $1.99 a month all the way to $99 a month).

Infrastructure

• We added a third server node to the cluster called ATLAS
• We altered our international routing to enable lower latency access to our server nodes worldwide
• We significantly upgraded our PROMETHEUS node going from 6 to 16 CPU cores

Email

• We greatly improved the appearance of our emails and now bundle our CSS in the email itself for reliability
• We standardised all our emails look and feel by creating a standard callable email function used by all our code
• We send more emails to you for things like email/password changes and query overages, payment failures etc

With all these changes the service has become really fleshed out but we're not done. We still have features planned for next year including our new API that allows upto 100 IP Addresses to be checked in a single query.

We're also working on a batch processing and webhook system which we think will be very beneficial to some of our largest customers, this should be available some time early next year after the multi-check API is brought online.

The final thing we wanted to discuss is our free tier and how we've been distributing larger free plans to communities that need them most. Protecting websites, forums, game servers, payment gateways and more is something we're very proud to do and our service was actually started due to our founder needing this very service to protect their own online properties which included chat rooms, forums, websites and game servers.

That's why we've from the very start offered a generous 1,000 free queries to anyone that signs up, we have no intention to restrict that offering or to disable our premium features. We're aware that there are many competitors in this space that differentiate between free and paid customers by restricting features such as limiting Whitelist/Blacklists, not offering statistics or easy to access online support. We're different and proudly so.

We've also gone out of our way to give larger free plans ranging from 10,000 to 80,000 daily queries to many people who run free online games, chat communities, forums and support groups. We're proud to support forums that help teenagers and young adults with thoughts of self harm and also open source developers who release software we all benefit from.

This year has been really great for us. We've seen huge volumes of new customers and also many developers across the web integrating our API into their products and services, in-fact we have a WordPress plugin being developed on our behalf which should be available in January.

We'd like to thank everyone who has taken a chance on our service and we're really looking forward to bringing you new features and improvements next year and with that last sign off we also want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.