Ping Proxies, a UK-based ethical residential proxy provider, helps data-driven companies and AI-focused start-ups access publicly available web data at scale. Unlike traditional data center proxies, residential proxies route internet traffic through real devices like smartphones, computers, and tablets connected to home networks rather than using data center servers. Ping Proxies sources these IP addresses from residential devices, providing businesses with high anonymity and a low block rate for web scraping and data mining. Their unique offering is supported by a fully owned, static residential ISP infrastructure developed through partnerships with carriers from the UK, France, the US, Germany, and Hong Kong.

When Ping Proxies first joined DigitalOcean in August, they were drawn to the simplicity and powerful scalability of DigitalOcean’s offerings. Ping Proxies has built a high-performance, globally scalable proxy infrastructure by deploying DigitalOcean’s Managed Databases and DigitalOcean App Platform.

Driving global connectivity with DigitalOcean products

As a company specializing in network infrastructure solutions, Ping Proxies needed to find a way to establish a global presence while delivering consistently low-latency services to their customers worldwide. To meet the growing demands of their customers, they needed an infrastructure that could scale effortlessly and ensure that the data was as close to the customer as possible.

“We didn’t think we could offer services outside of Europe and the United States before working with Digital Ocean, but thanks to your global presence, we’ve been able to expand to Asia and have seen a surge of customers in that region,” Timur shares.

Here’s how DigitalOcean products helped:

• Managed PostgreSQL: The ability to replicate data near the edge with a wide range of available locations for managed databases allowed Ping Proxies to achieve low-latency performance. The ease of setting up replica nodes means they can replicate customer data closer to them, supporting faster access and reliability. Point-in-time database recovery ensures business continuity by allowing quick restoration of critical business data in case of accidental deletions, providing peace of mind.

• TimescaleDB Extension: Facilitated the creation of a log hypertable capable of ingesting thousands of network logs per second, which maintains exceptional query performance even at scale.

• Automatic Failover: The automatic failover capability of managed database nodes was a major selling point, giving Ping Proxies reassurance when maintaining uptime for their proxy servers.

• Global Infrastructure: By using Droplets to send proxy requests from multiple worldwide locations, Ping Proxies has built a feature-rich proxy tester, providing realistic tests of their proxies for customers globally. With support for regional read replicas, Ping Proxies ensured low-latency performance and improved API speed globally, boosting analytics capabilities and service responsiveness.

• DigitalOcean App Platform: App Platform simplifies the hosting of their website and dashboard, allowing Ping Proxies to focus on delivering the best possible service and dashboard without the hassle of managing infrastructure.

• Database alerts and notifications: Real-time observability has helped Ping Proxies increase their overall system reliability by proactively monitoring and addressing potential issues before they impact their business.

Timur also recounted that DigitalOcean offers accessible and cost-effective support plans tailored to the needs of developers, startups, and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). “We’ve been really impressed with the knowledge of your support team and its proactive nature. Multiple times we’ve had support reach out to us proactively to discuss potential database issues or compatibility before they ever became business impacting issues,” Timur marks.

Partnership with DigitalOcean Hatch program

The DigitalOcean Hatch program offers the tools, resources, and 12 months of DigitalOcean credits to optimize infrastructure and resources. The startup credits provided by the Hatch program helped Ping Proxies to integrate DigitalOcean’s services without having to worry about heavy infrastructure costs during their early stages.

“Since joining Hatch, we have seen MMR grow 90.4%, and we now have over 1 million USD ARR, all while maintaining hosting costs in the low thousands of dollars,” Timur notes.

Scaling today and building for the future

Looking ahead, Ping Proxies plans to broaden its global footprint. They are exploring the use of DigitalOcean’s GPU Droplets for AI inference tasks in upcoming projects as they continue to build their infrastructure and add new products for the emerging market of AI agents.

“The ability to scale infrastructure with ease—a couple clicks with zero downtime, and you can handle 10X more traffic—is amazing! We also haven’t had a single moment of downtime in the last six months,” says Timur.