Learn more about Oxylabs’s web scraping capabilities, internet connection speed, pricing, proxy gateways, and pools, among other important details about Oxylabs in this Oxylabs reviews.
Oxylabs Overview
If you have been researching a lot about proxies of lately, chances are there that you must have come across Oxylabs and how their proxies are some of the best. But are they telling you the truth? Should your decision be based on what you read about Oxylabs on their websites?
If you do that, you will be doing yourself a disservice because everyone likes to horn his/her own trumpet – that’s why you need a third party to provide you an honest review. Here on this blog, that’s what we do, and in this article, I will be reviewing Oxylabs proxies. However, let take a look at a brief overview of Oxylabs.
Oxylabs is a proxy service provider that offers both residential proxies and datacenter proxies. In addition to proxies, they also provide web crawlers. However, in this article, the focus here is on their residential proxies, as that’s the one they are well known for and their main focus. Oxylabs’s IP pool is huge, and they boast of having proxies in almost all countries of the world. Oxylabs is based in Lithuania. Their proxies are secure and reliable.
They are effective for use in web scraping, Ad Verification, SEO auditing, and email protection, among others. However, they are an expensive option compared to many proxy providers in the market.
| Parameter | Feature |
|---|---|
| IP Type | Residential/ Datacenter |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | 50GB – $600 (Monthly) |
| Pool Of IPs | 30+ Million |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Cites/Countries |
| Authentication | IP Authentication and Username/Password |
| Speed | Excellent |
| Free Trial | 7 days |
| Refund Policy | 7 days |
| Support | Support Ticket |
| Jurisdiction Location | Lithuania |
Oxylabs Pros
Let start this review stating the good sides of Oxylabs – both the obvious one stated on their websites and the one we founded out on our own.
Enough Pool of IP and Location
One of the aspects proxy service boasts with is the number of proxies in their pool and their network. Oxylabs is one of the boastful ones in this regard – and yes, it is useful boasting. Oxylabs has one of the largest pool of IP in the market.
They have over 30 million residential proxies in their residential IP pool and over 2 million in their datacenter Pool. This makes it the second-largest residential provider in the market by a number of proxies.
Aside the fact that they have a large number of residential IPs, one thing you’ll come to appreciate about their proxies is their geographical distribution – Oxylabs proxies are distributed across the globe with countries like the US, UK, India, Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, and Spain has over one million proxies each.
Other countries have a sizable number too. They have an interactive map (the above is a screenshot of it) that hovering your map over a country will display the number of Oxylabs proxies in that country.
Geo-Targeting
When you subscribe to Oxylabs residential proxies, you get the capability to choose a location that you will use proxies from. For many proxy providers, targeting countries is the only targeting option you have. But for Oxylabs, a new level of opportunity is opened to you. Their proxies are not only country proxies, but they also have city proxies as well, and as such, you can go specific and target a particular city – and they have proxies in major cities in the world. For example, as a sneaker copper, instead of targeting US proxies, you have the option of targeting New York if the server of the sneaker site is located in New York.
Decent Scraping Performance
Oxylabs was developed by experts in web scraping, and as such, it is expected that it performs well in crawling and scraping data from the Internet. Interestingly, Oxylabs has proven that they do not only have a large pool of residential IP addresses, but they have also incorporated their experience into making sure their proxies are perfect for web scraping.
We ran a web scraping performance test on popular web sites using their proxies. The result we got was impressive, with an average success rate of 87 percent. Below is the result of the test.
| Performance on 300 Concurrent connections | ||||
| Test | Success Rate (%) | Error (%) | TimeOut (%) | Block (%) |
| Amazon | 95 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Adidas | 97 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Booking | 88 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Bing.com | 86 | 0 | 0 | 14 |
| Craigslist | 98 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 82 | 0 | 8 | 10 | |
| Nike | 90 | 0 | 2 | 8 |
| 90 | 0 | 3 | 7 | |
| 70 | 1 | 4 | 25 | |
| Youtube | 74 | 0 | 10 | 14 |
| 87 | ||||
Looking at the table above, it is clear that Oxylabs residential proxies can be used to scrape data from the web.
You may be like,
- How to prevent getting blacklisted or blocked when crawling a website
- How to Scrape Data from Linkedin Using Proxies
- Use Chrome Headless and Dedicated Proxies to Scrape Any Website
However, websites such as Google, YouTube, and Bing will block you (to avoid bot traffic) and require you solve captchas before you are given access. If you make use of a good captchas solver, you shouldn’t have problems scraping data from the web using their proxies.
Acceptable Proxy Speed
Response Time
How long does it take for a request sent through Oxylabs proxies to get to the target websites and give you back the response? We needed to find this out, and to do this, we subjected Oxylabs proxies to our response time. Below is a chart describing our results.
Average Response Time (s): 4.333
We got an average response time of 3.49 seconds. This value is not bad and can be termed as decent response time for a residential proxy. This is because residential proxies have a higher ping rate because of the rerouting of requests through residential IP addresses.
Proxy Connection Speed
To ascertain how the number of data that can be transmitted to and from a website per unit time using Oxylabs proxies, we made use of the free Internet connection speed tool – Speedtest. Below is the result we got testing proxies in Chicago.
- Average Ping: 81ms
- Average Download: 24.31 Mbps
- Average Upload: 17.79 Mbps
Dedicated Account Manager
Even though support is through email only, you are never alone when you choose to make use of Oxylabs proxy services. This is because immediately you buy any of their proxy plans, you are assigned an account manager that will not only attend to you in times of need but will guide you through all the steps you need to avoid making mistakes.
Because a manager is assigned to you, the support you get is more personalized and swift.
Easy to Use
The team at Oxylabs did a great job here. Even for first-time users, using their website is as easy as ABC. You necessarily won’t get stoked in any step because the dashboard has been designed to be intuitive, clean, beautiful, and minimalistic, It’s same as smartproxy.
The dashboard only has 5 sections in the navigation menu. The dashboard is quite similar to that of GeoSurf, which is one of the most simple dashboard. Only a few clicks and a task is done – no BS!
Free Trial and Refund Policy
You might be wondering why this is showing up in the pro section – after all, most software has this in other to earn the trust of their customers. Well, this is not common in the residential proxy market, especially among premium providers. This is because they believe that their track record and huge customer base are enough to convince any intending customer to use them, and as such, no need to lure them with free trials and refund policy.
To others, they try to avoid giving free trials and refunds because a lot of fraudsters have abused the opportunity. However, Oxylabs looked beyond all these and provided the two at ones despite the fact that it is a premium proxy service provider. They offer up to a 7 days free trial (you have to request via a contact form) and a 7 days refund policy.
Oxylabs Cons
Now that we are done discussing the reasons you won’t go wrong using Oxylabs proxies, it is time to dive into things that will make you have a rethink before pitching your tent with them. These are discussed below.
Oxylabs is Expensive
Residential proxies are meant to be expensive compared to their datacenter counterparts. Oxylabs from the onset was developed as a premium proxy service, and as such, the pricing is premium (expensive). This has become one of the major reasons a lot of people shy away from using them.
Only people with thick wallets can afford to use them because you cannot justify using them on a hobbyist project or projects with a small budget and financial gains as that will get you to run at a loss.
They have a good number of plans you can subscribe to, ranging from Basic, Pro, Enterprise, and corporate. For their Basic plan which is the smallest, the cost of subscribing to it is $600. Included in this plan is a limited bandwidth of 50 GB. If you exhaust this, you will have to pay for more bandwidth to continue using the service.
Support is Only Through Email
While many proxy providers have devised other means to communicate effectively with their customers and provide them support as fast and real-time as possible to avoid frustrating and losing them, Oxylabs is still stoked with using Email for providing support. No live chat support. While this might be seen as the deal-breaker, it is not. This is because they have the FAQs page that’s extensive and comprehensive enough. Also, they reply to emails as swiftly as possible.
Do I Recommend Oxylabs?
Yes, I do. This is because, as far as my research proved to me, Oxylabs does not have any dent in its image. It’s a tested and trusted solution especially when you talk of their residential proxies. The fact that it is a premium proxy service provider and its cater to big businesses make them a recommended option.
Frankly, if big businesses are making use of a service, chances are there that this service is highly effective and functional else they won’t be using it. However, you have to be wary of the price