Hey, are you researching how to choose the best proxy provider? Then you’re exactly
where you need to be! After discussing some smaller proxy providers like Infatica
and Smartproxy, it’s time to get to know one of the big sharks of the proxy market – Oxylabs!
Let’s start this review with what Oxylabs has to offer
If you’re interested in residential proxies, Oxylabs can impress with its network of 100M
That's right - 100M residential IPs. Today, it’s the largest proxy pool out of all the providers,
though Oxylabs is closely competing with Luminati.
Oxylabs’ residential proxies cover all countries and most cities in the world.
There’s also ASN filtering for those who need it.
If you choose the rotating option, the rotation settings range from each request to 30 minutes.
And if you need a consistent identity, you can opt for a pool of 100K static residential IPs.
You can authenticate the proxies using user:pass or whitelisted IP authorization.
The only limitation we noticed was that they don’t support the SOCKS5 protocol.
Also, be aware that some websites are blocked, most notably Google. To access it,
you’ll have to use Oxylabs' Real-Time Crawler instead. More on that in a moment.
Aside from regular residential IPs, Oxylabs recently introduced something called Next-Gen
residential proxies. It's a new and pretty awesome (if not buzzwordy) product. The next-gen proxies
use things like machine learning and AI for dynamic fingerprinting, adaptive parsing,
and they even render JS heavy websites at scale. Though, despite their name, they’re
not really proxies in the strict sense, but rather a scraping API, similar to what Crawlera offers.
If your needs would be better satisfied with good old datacenter IPs,
Oxylabs has you covered here as well:
With over 2 million proxies (which is the largest pool among all the providers) and
unlimited concurrent connections, the company is ready even for largest scraping tasks.
What’s especially nice is that you can choose how many subnets you need:
For 1,000 IPs you can get from 4 to as many as 1,000 subnets.
These are proxies dedicated for your exclusive use, so no neighbour will get in your way.
The IPs cover 82 locations around the world. This is a lot.
They support all three main protocols, including SOCKS5
and they have both - user:pass and whitelisted IP authorisation.
Unfortunately, there’s no proxy rotation out of the box. But,
you can set it up using Oxylabs' Proxy Rotator.
The final product that Oxylabs offers is called Real-Time Crawler.
It’s made for companies that want to scrape data from sites like Google and Amazon
but don’t have the resources to maintain their own scraping infrastructure. You just enter a target,
and Oxylabs returns the data for you neatly parsed in HTML or JSON.
If something fails – you don’t pay. This saves a lot of time and human resources.
But how about Performance? Both in 2019 and 2020,
our tests found Oxylabs to have one of the best residential proxies in the market.
They are especially suitable for data scraping and ad verification tasks.
By the way, what do you use proxies for? Share with us in the comments! We checked the IPs in
multiple online databases: none of them leaked headers, none were identified as proxies,
or appeared in any IP blacklists. So you can rely on Oxylabs, come hell or high water.
Is Oxylabs easy to use? It depends on how much you like doing by things yourself.
There is self-service, but it’s limited for now. Most of the tasks,
sometimes even creating an account, will be taken care of by your dedicated account manager.
But don’t worry – Oxylabs still has a dashboard, where you can track your proxy usage,
create sub-users, whitelist IPs, and see your billing information.
If you want to access the IPs programmatically, there’s an API.
The API lets you create and delete sub-users, assign and manage their
traffic limits. Oxylabs has extensive documentation to help you get into it.
What if something doesn’t work? You just contact your account manager for support.
Since you always speak with the same person, they know which problems you had in the past,
so you don’t have to explain everything from the beginning. Therefore,
communication is smooth and professional.
We tested how fast their support is and asked a question via email.
The reply came in about 20 minutes and, from my experience, this is very good.
With such a professional service and a variety of products, you’re probably wondering:
how much? Well, the proxies don’t come cheap. The entry threshold is pretty high:
$300/20 GB for the residential proxies, $180/100 addresses for the datacenter IPs.
Things change as you buy up. At this point, more factors come into play,
such as long-term contracts and domains, so you might get the price down even lower
than advertised. Sure, it might be a little too much for a regular small-time scraper;
but it’s another matter for businesses. It all boils down to your needs. We personally liked
Oxylabs so much that we gave it the Best Proxy Provider award – two years in a row.
You can try out the two cheapest residential proxy plans by yourself, using self-service. So,
don’t be afraid to dip your toe in the water and try out what Oxylabs can offer for you.
If you’re not convinced, simply look at the competition. You’ll find either fewer features,
worse service, or otherwise, the price will be similar, perhaps even higher.
There’s no deying it: proxies can cost a significant amount of money.
You’ve probably asked yourself: can’t I get them for free? In theory,
yes – you can! But do you know the risks involved? If not, we’re going to cover that
in our next video. So, subscribe if you don’t want to miss it. In the meantime,
visit Proxyway.com for guides and other proxy provider reviews. Hope to see you soon!