
Scrolling through today’s headlines or cleaning out your inbox is only a sliver of the internet’s real workload. Out in the background, peer-to-peer apps are flinging gigabytes back and forth, gamers are shooting millisecond-timed packets across the globe, and traders are drinking in live market data without a break. A plain HTTP proxy can hide your web browser, of course, but the moment an app speaks anything other than “web,” it stalls out. That’s when SOCKS5 steps in. This protocol can ferry nearly any kind of traffic, and when you choose a shared SOCKS5 plan, you get that wide-open flexibility at a price small teams and solo builders can afford. This article will explain what shared SOCKS5 proxies are and highlight their key benefits.