Do you want to buy residential proxies from the IPRoyal proxy service? If you answer yes to this question, then I will advise you to read our expert review to discuss both the pros and cons of using their residential proxies before making a buying decision.
There are so many proxy providers in the market that going through the list of providers alone can be tasking, not to talk of making a choice of provider for your task. The IPRoyal proxy service is one of the providers that have graced the proxy market and according to the information on its website – it is one of the best proxy services in the market.
But are they telling us the truth or its just a marketing gimmick like every other provider does? That is the answer we seek before doing research on the proxies and you will find out the truth about their proxies whether they are best for you or not in the sections below. For now, let take a look at an overview of the IPRoyal service.
IPRoyal Proxy Service Overview
The IPRoyal proxy service might not be one of the most popular proxy services in the market but it has got in own place in the market. This provider does not only offer residential proxies; they also offer static residential proxies, datacenter proxies, sneaker proxies, and even 4G proxies. Our focus is on their residential proxy service which I can categorically tell you that the proxies work.
However, there is more a proxy service just working. How reliable are they? Are they secure? Do they have friendly and affordable pricing? Are there issues you cannot overlook?
For the IPRoyal residential service, we can say that they are quite unique in the way they source their proxies that make them quite unique.
The proxy pool is not large when you compare it to that of the bigger providers with millions of Its but can serve your need depending on the number of proxies you need to use. They have got support for a good number of locations and from them, you can get both rotating and sticky proxies from them and their proxies are quite compatible with many of the popular websites on the Internet.
However, just like every other provider, they have got their downsides which include slow speed and small pool size, among others. We would be taking a look into a detailed discussion on both the pros and the cons of IPRoyal residential proxies.
| Parameters | Features |
| IP Type | Residential IPs |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | From $1.75/GB (Buy 10TB) |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) and SOCKS |
| Authentication | Username and password |
| IP Locations | Over 195 locations |
| Instagram Compatibility | Yes |
| Sneaker Compatibility | Yes |
| Speed | Slow |
| Support | Fast -live chat available |
| Refund Policy | Not available |
| IP Replacement | Yes |
| P2P/Torrenting | No |
| Jurisdiction | Canada |
IPRoyal Proxies Pros
The IPRoyal proxy service has got many clients out of which a good number of them are return customers. This is because of some of the pros otherwise known as strengths the IPRoyal service possesses. Below are some of the pros of IPRoyal residential proxies.
IPs Are Ethically Sourced (IPRoyal Pawns)
If there is one reason that makes this provider unique, it would be the way it sources the IP addresses it uses for routing its client traffic. Saying it is unique does not mean it is the only provider that sources its IP address via ethical methods – there are many other providers that do that.
However, for some of the other providers, while the process is ethical, the owners of the device may not be aware before the term of usage is usually buried deep within the term of usage in the third-party apps the proxy services use to embed their proxy software. For the IPRoyal, they do not do this – if your device I being used as an exit node for the service, you will know and be compensated for it.
IPRoyal has a service known as the IPRoyal Pawns that was set up to source IPs ethically.
Now they no longer offer this service, so you can read more, Honeygain Vs IPRoyal Pawns Vs PacketStream Vs Peer2Profit
How the service work is simple – they provide you an application to install on your device and you get paid for allowing the application uses your Internet connectivity.
The amount you earn is determined by the amount of bandwidth and duration you left your device open to the network. While you will not be making a lot of money – the amount you will earn could be a little bit useful especially if you have access to free Internet and you are in a third-world country.
You may be like to read,
- What is Honeygain and Is It Legit to make passtive income online?
- 6 Best Alternatives to PacketStream similar to IPRoyal
The point is not about the amount you will earn but the fact that you are rightfully aware and accept to provide your device and its IP address to be used in the network.
Price Affordable for Small Marketers
There is no doubt that pricing is an important fact for marketers when making a choice of a provider to use for their tasks. It is generally believed that residential proxies are expensive when compared to their datacenter counterparts. However, this does not mean they are not affordable and the likes of IPRoyal make this possible.
For IPRoyal, the pricing for their residential proxies is quite affordable and even one of the cheapest you will get from the list of residential proxies that work. The pricing is based on bandwidth, at $7 per GB. However, the bigger your order, the cheaper it will be; for example, buying 10 TB can get as low as $1.75 per GB.
One thing you need to know that is also quite a pro is the fact that they do not have a minimum monetary requirement. You can buy as small as 1GB making it the perfect residential proxy service for small marketers on a tight budget.
However, it is important I stress here that 1GB would get exhausted in no time and as such, you should pay for the amount of bandwidth you are sure will get your task done. If you do not have the money to buy from premium providers with an expensive minimum monetary commitment, then using the residential proxies provided by IPRoyal is the way to go.
Offer Both rotating and Sticky Proxies
The IPRoyal residential proxy service is not different from the other residential proxy services in terms of ownership of the IPs in its pool. They do not own the IPs in their pool and as such, do not have control over the IPs. For this reason, they do not offer true static proxies.
The proxies are rotating proxies that change IP addresses frequently depending on your requirement or when the IP assigned to you goes offline. Generally, according to the guideline, you cannot maintain the same IP for more than 24 hours. In reality, you will be lucky to even have half of that from a single IP.
However, you can get sticky proxies that would maintain the same IP address for a while to facilitate account management which any suspicion.
If what you want are rotating proxies that change IP after a specific period of time, you can get that from this provider. Currently, IPRoyal has support for time-based rotation for 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 30 minutes. Another feature related to IP rotation that you will come to like about IPRoyal is its support for instant IP change anytime you want which makes it perfect for many use cases. You can get the IP assigned to you instantly changed via the dashboard or via an API request.
With both sticky and rotating proxies being offered, the proxies have diverse use ranging from tasks that require IP addresses maintained as Lin the case of account management to tasks that require frequent change of IP such as web scraping.
Good Location Coverage
As websites on the Internet are becoming more localized and the content you can have access to is determined by your location, a proxy service with support for diverse locations is the way to go. This is not always the case if you only want proxies from a specific location as you can stick to a provider that supports such region only. However, for tasks that would require accessing data from many regions, then location support is a good plus.
The IPRoyal service has got good location coverage. The network covers over 195 countries across the world across Europe, America (both North and South), Asia, and Africa. However, it does not have the same number of IPs for these countries.
The top location terms of number IPs include Vietnam, Western Sahara, Yemen, and Zambia. This correlates well with the countries that the amount of money that would be earned from the IPRoyal Pawn service would be useful.
Easy to Setup and Use
Some proxy services would make you go through steps that using them would become a headache. For the IPRoyal service, you do not need to be a technical person to use their proxies. If you have used a proxy server in the past, there is a high chance that you will find using their proxies easy to as the process of using them is basically the same with other proxy services.
All you need to do is register an account, find your account or pay for a plan directly and get the proxy details (proxy address, port, username, and password) from the user dashboard. IPRoyal does not support IP authentication for now – you will have to make do with the username and password authentication which is quite easy to use.
IPRoyal Proxies Cons
IPRoyal is not the ideal proxy service yet. It does have areas it needs to work on to become the proxy service with no flaws. Below are some of the cons you will need to consider before using their proxies.
Speed of the Proxies Need Improvement
Speed is actually an important factor for many when making a choice of a provider. If speed means a lot to you, then you might want to wait until they improve the speed of their service. This does not mean the speed is terribly bad. I personally used the proxies and the speed is quite acceptable. However, if you are the type that goes into detail and wants to test the proxies, then you will not be impressed with the speed.
I use the Speedtest by Okla to check the performance of IPRoyal residential proxies and I couldn’t get any results. It takes the tool time to find the optimal server and even after that was done, the tool throws an exception. I switched to a different proxy and it worked – switched back and got the same result. So we couldn’t get results to ascertain the true speed – but it work.
Residential Pool Size is Small
To be honest with you, one other downside I see with this provider is the number of IP addresses it has in its pool. The residential proxy market has a good number of proxy providers with millions of IP addresses ranging from 2 million to 100 million IP addresses.
In such a market, the IPRoyal serve has 2M+ IP addresses. To make it worse, the top locations for this provider are locations where their IPs do not have high demand like the US and UK.
One thing I also find interesting is that the number of IPs on their website didn’t provide detail on the actual number of residential IPs – they give you the total number of IPs they have – currently about 2 million. It is only when you ask them that you get to discover that they have only 100K IPs in their Royal residential pool. However, this number is still useful to a good number of markets and only big marketers would have a problem with this.
Updated on Jan 1st, 2023
Perhaps seeing the shortcomings, IPRoyal is rebranding and now you can see they have 2M+ residential IP pool.
Do we Recommend IPRoyal Proxies?
Just like every other provider in the market, the IPRoyal service has its strengths and weaknesses discussed as pros and cons above. However, if the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, we recommend the provider. For this reason, we recommend IPRoyal as a residential proxy provider.
The IPs in their pool are ethically soured with the owners being compensated financially. The proxies they offer are rotating proxies with sticky ports supported. From our test, they are compatible with many of the web services on the Internet. However, we couldn’t get speed results and the pool can be termed small depending on the number of IPs you need.