Are you researching how to choose the best proxy provider? Then you're exactly where you need to be. After discussing smaller proxy providers like Infatica and Smartproxy, it's time to get to know one of the big sharks of a proxy market, Oxylabs. Let's start this review with what Oxylabs has to offer.
Oxylabs' Residential Proxies
If you're interested in residential proxies, Oxylabs can impress with this network of 100 million. That's right,100 million residential IPs today. It's the largest proxy pool out of all the providers. Though Oxylabs is closely competing with Bright Data.
Oxylabs's residential proxies cover all countries and most cities in the world. There's also ASM filtering for those who need it. If you choose a 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. We can authenticate for proxies using a user pass or whitelisted ip authorization.
Be aware that some websites are blocked, most notably Google. You'll have to use Oxylabs's real-time crawler instead to access it. More on that in a moment, aside from regular residential IPs.
Next-gen Residential Proxies of Oxylabs
Oxylabs recently introduced something called Next-gen residential proxies. It's a new and pretty awesome, if not buzzword product. The Next-gen proxies use machine learning and AI for dynamic fingerprinting adapter passing. They even render Javascript to heavy websites at scale. Though despite the name, they're not really processed in a strict sense.
But rather scraping API similar to what cholera offers. If your needs would be better satisfied with good old datacenter reps, Oxylabs has recovered here with over 2 million proxies (the largest pool among all the providers) and unlimited concurrent connections.
The company is ready even for larger scraping tasks. What's especially nice is that you can choose how many subnets you need for one thousand IPs. You can get from four to as many as one thousand subnets. These are proxies dedicated to your exclusive use.
So no neighbor 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 authorization. Unfortunately, there's no proxy rotation out of a box, but you can set it up using Oxylabs' proxy Rotator.
Real-Time Crawler of Oxylabs
The final product that Oxylabs offers is called Real-Time Crawler. It's made for companies that want to script data from sites like Google and Amazon. But don't have the resources to maintain their own scraping infrastructure. You just enter the 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 what about the performance? 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. We checked 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.
How to Use Oxylabs?
Is Oxylabs easy to use? It depends on how much you like doing things by yourself. There is self-service, but it's limited for now. A dedicated account manager will take care of most of the tasks, sometimes even creating an account. 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 and assign and manage the 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 speak to 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 the support was and asked the question via email. The reply came in about 20 minutes and, from my experience. This is very good.
The Price of Oxylabs
With such a professional service and various products, you're probably wondering: how much? Well, the proxies don't come cheap. The entry threshold is high: $300/25GB for the residential proxies and $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 your 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.
You can try 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 the price will be similar, perhaps even higher.
There's no denying it: proxies can cost a significant amount of money. You've probably asked yourself: can I get them for free? In theory, yes, you can! But the risks are high!
