Storm Proxies is one of the popular proxy providers in the market. This article provides an honest review of its scraping performance, speed, pricing, customer support, and much more important information about Storm Proxies.
Storm Proxies Overview
If you have been researching about residential proxy providers, chances are, aside from the top on the line providers like Luminati, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy, among other premium providers, you have come across Storm Proxies as one of the best providers. Well, how true is that?
We try to find out because we couldn’t trust what we read on their website because they might just be a well-planned marketing strategy. Why should you take our review serious? Because we are a professional proxy reviewer.
We have reviewed many proxy providers and give proxy usage recommendations. This review will cover all you need to know about StormProxies’s residential proxies. We are aware that they have datacenter proxies as well, we tested and reviewed their private dedicated proxies also, but that will be a topic for another day.
| Parameter | Feature |
|---|---|
| IP Type | Residential |
| Price Charged | Ports |
| Price Sample | 5 Ports – $50 (Monthly) |
| Pool Of IPs | 70,000 |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) and Socks5 |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Countries |
| Authentication | IP Authentication |
| Speed | Average |
| Free Trial | No |
| Refund Policy | 24 hours |
| Support | Live Support and Contact Form. |
| Jurisdiction Location | USA |
Storm Proxies has been in existence for over 3 years now, with it coming into the proxy market in 2016. With its year of establishment, one will expect that it’s still new for it to earn the kind of trust other providers have earned. Well, while it cannot be said to be in the league of premium providers, it has carved a niche for itself, and it is regarded as one of the best among its equals.
Its proxies are quite fast as per residential proxies, and they are incredibly cheap and lean pocket-friendly. They have got good customer service, and they have been found to be effective and functional for web scraping tasks. However, they are quite limited in their area coverage, geo-targeting options, and authentication method, among others.
Read more: How Backconnect Proxies Work?
Storm Proxies Pros
This section of the article will be used to discuss the areas where Storm Proxies can be said to perform excellently well.
Cheapest Residential IP Provider
Storm Proxies has got to be the cheapest residential proxy provider compared to other performing proxies. The general belief is that because of the reliability and trust residential proxies have earned, they are naturally supposed to be expensive, and this is popularized by premium providers. With Storm Proxies, you can get residential proxies without having to empty your wallet.
First, it is important you know their proxies are not metered and are not sold based on bandwidth as other providers do – this then means that you are provided an unlimited connection (limited to one device per package though but with Multithreaded support). Their proxies are priced based on port (also known as proxy gateway). They have prepackaged plans ranging from 5 ports to 50 ports.
Their 5 ports plan is priced $50 monthly. This makes the price of a port $10. However, if you go for their 50 port plan, the price of a port drops down to $6. Whichever plan you choose, you are given access to a residential IP pool of 40,000 residential IPs. Interestingly, if what you need is just a port, you can get it for $19 too.
Easy to Use
Unlike other big players in the industry that have sophisticated systems in place to make things easier for their clients, including browser extensions and APIs to be consumed by developers, Storm Proxies do not have such. In fact, it has got to be one of the providers out there following the minimalistic approach. However, with simplicity comes to ease of usage.
You are provided with the ports you paid for in the form of proxy gateways. What you use is the proxy gateways, the system will take care of IP rotation for you.
Acceptable Scraping Performance
When it comes to scraping and crawling the web, you are going to have mixed feelings using Storm Proxies. They work well for a good number of websites, and in some, you are going to be dealing with a lot of connection errors because of website’s anti-spam systems and captchas. However, on a general base, Their performance is acceptable. I am saying this because their proxies passed our scraping performance test. Below is the result.
| Performance on 300 Concurrent connections | ||||
| Test | Success Rate (%) | Error (%) | TimeOut (%) | Block (%) |
| Amazon | 70 | 0 | 1 | 29 |
| Adidas | 78 | 2 | 2 | 18 |
| Booking | 80 | 7 | 3 | 10 |
| Bing.com | 69 | 1 | 5 | 25 |
| Craigslist | 73 | 10 | 2 | 15 |
| 77 | 3 | 8 | 11 | |
| Nike | 62 | 2 | 11 | 25 |
| 74 | 6 | 0 | 20 | |
| 65 | 0 | 4 | 31 | |
| Youtube | 70 | 0 | 0 | 30 |
| 71.8 | ||||
On average, 71 percent of our requests were successful. The remaining 29 percent were unsuccessful because of either server internal error or blocking. However, we observed that with captchas solvers, the connection errors reduced greatly.
Acceptable Proxy Speed
Response Time
If you have tested residential proxies against datacenter proxies, you will know that their speed isn’t comparable. This is because there is a performance overhead in the form of a delay caused by the rerouting of requests to residential proxies. Whilst not expecting Storm Proxies residential IPs to outperform datacenter proxies, they were fast enough for most use cases.
Average Response Time (s): 6.144
From the table and chart above, I do not possibly need to tell you that their average response time is decent even though it cannot be compared with what you get from major players.
Proxy Connection Speed
Most proxy performance tests put the download speed as well as the upload speed into account. The ping in the form of latency has also been considered. We needed to check the size of data that can be transmitted through Storm Proxies per second. The result we got (see below) is good, considering the fact that they are cheap and you are given access to the Internet unlimited for a month.
- Average Ping: 101ms
- Average Download: 19.95 Mbps
- Average Upload: 12.86 Mbps
Responsive Customer Support Team
When it comes to customer support, you have to give it up to Storm Proxies. They have a flop in this regard, which is their lack of different communication channels for their customers. While some providers provide live chat support and support tickets, the only way you can reach Storm Proxies team quickly is via their email. However, they respond as swiftly as possible, with most customers getting a response within 24 hours and some getting in about an hour.
IP Rotation Acceptable
Storm Proxies is certainly not the best residential proxy provider when it comes to IP rotation. However, that does not mean it does not have support for rotating IP – the support is just minimal. However, it is acceptable in some situations. Storm Proxies does not have IP rotation by session. It only has support for rotating IP every 5 minutes.
Storm Proxies Cons
The pro section of the article is still being mixed with some of the cons. However, there are still more bad aspects of using proxies, and as such, it is wise to say Storm Proxies have room for improvement.
Limited Geographical Coverage and Geo-targeting Options
Even though Storm Proxies is somehow new in the industry, I see no reason why its coverage should be as limiting as it is. Their servers are located in only two locations. The United States and the European region. Unfortunately, because they do not have much presence in other areas, they do not publicly state the locations as other providers do. It will have been better if one knows the countries in the EU region they have a presence in before subscribing.
As far as geo-targeting is concerned, you can only target the 2 regions in Storm Proxies. No city targeting option even for the regions they support. This makes it one of their biggest flops. From information available on their website, I also cannot see anywhere they stated that they are looking forward to supporting other locations as well.
Has One of the Smallest IP Pools
If you are the type that has had experience with some premium providers, you are going to be disappointed with the size of Storm Proxies residential proxies. While other providers have over 10 million residential IPs in their pool, Storm Proxies have only a little over 70,000. Even at that, regardless of the plan you subscribe to, you are only given access to a pool of 40,000 residential IPs.
No Free Trial
Accepted, free trials have been abused by users a lot, and proxy providers are shying away from them. But Storm Proxies shouldn’t be one of them. This is because they have a good number of limitations that they need a trial to convince intending customers. However, their own way of providing free trial is offering a 24 hours money-back guarantee.
This means that you have to pay for any of their plans, and if you are not satisfied with their service, contact them within 24 hours and get a refund.
No Username and Password Authentication
There are two methods of authentication as far as proxies are concerned – username and password authentication, as well as IP authentication. In Storm Proxies, the only method of authentication is the IP authentication. Also, you can only whitelist 1 device IP address per subscription. This makes it a little bit less convenient for people that prefer to use “username and password” for authentication because of its simplicity.
Do I Recommend Storm Proxies?
There’s no proxy in the market without flops. However, looking beyond the flops, what do they offer, and can you sacrifice the flops for the good aspects? That should be the question. No doubt, Storm Proxies does not meet the standard set by premium providers.
However, in its own way, because of its pricing, and scraping performance, it is usable. You can go ahead and buy their plan if the cons aren’t much of a concern to you.