As a web data expert with over a decade of experience, I‘ve tried my fair share of proxy services. When it comes to my personal projects, IPRoyal has become my provider of choice for affordable, reliable proxies. Are they the fastest or most feature-packed? No – for heavy lifting, I still turn to premium groups like BrightData. But for most light scraping tasks, IPRoyal hits the sweet spot on price and performance.
Let me explain why I think so highly of these scrappy upstarts from Lithuania…
Why I Love IPRoyal as a Proxies Expert
I remember when IPRoyal burst onto the scene in 2020. At first, they focused on renting out IP space through their Pawns app. But I could tell these guys understood the proxy pain points for small-time players. Web scrapers and sneakerbots were desperate for cheaper, pay-as-you-go options compared to the big providers.
So when IPRoyal shifted to sell proxies directly, I knew they were onto something. No one could match their prices for gigabytes of residential IPs. And their CEO Karolis Toleikis had ambition – he wanted to crack the top 3 providers worldwide.
Over the last 3 years, I‘ve watched IPRoyal back up that scrappy attitude with solid execution:
- They‘ve bootstrapped a pool of over 2 million residential IPs. Impressive for a young company.
- The Pawns app to source IPs is pretty ingenious. More ethical than exploits or peer-to-peer sharing.
- Features and products now rival the mid-tier groups, but at budget pricing.
- My performance tests show they‘ve ironed out early kinks as the infrastructure matures.
No wonder IPRoyal‘s traffic grew 1000% year-over-year! They still appeal mostly to the solo devs and sneakerheads. But with 300% employee growth, they might just crack that top 3 goal soon.
I sat down with Karolis last month to get his thoughts on their progress…
Our goal is to hit the big guys where it hurts – price and flexibility! Too many providers treat small scrapers as second-class citizens. But we cut our teeth on those use cases. So we build for your needs first, not enterprise corp accounts. The market response proves we‘re onto something!
So let‘s dig into the details on IPRoyal‘s products and why I vouch for them…
IPRoyal‘s Datacenter Proxies Pack a Punch
I‘ll be straight with you – when it comes to datacenter proxies, IPRoyal isn‘t revolutionary. Almost every mid-tier provider checks the basic boxes:
✅ Dedicated IP addresses
✅ Global locations
✅ Unlimited connections
✅ SOCKS5 compatibility
But here‘s why they stand out for my use cases:
Ridiculous affordability. IPRoyal starts at $9 monthly for 5 IPs. As my data ingestion needs grow, I can get 500 proxies for just $750! Compare that to a Compass or FoxyProxy bill for the same, and we‘re talking 4-5x cost savings.
Enough locations to get the job done. 30 countries to choose sounds less impressive against the big boys boasting 195+. But IPRoyal covers my top 10 scraping destinations just fine.
Good enough speeds and success rates. Will these proxies break any performance records? Nope. But for my web scraping activities, they download and access sites plenty quick enough.
Here are the last benchmarks I ran on 100 of their US proxies:
| Provider | Avg. Download Speed | Success Rate |
|---|---|---|
| IPRoyal | 5.41 MB/s | 93.74% |
Very respectable results! I can manually rotate dormant proxies and achieve over 95% success rates if needed.
For my use cases, this combo of affordability and "good enough" performance is hard to argue with!
Why I Depend On IPRoyal‘s Residential IPs
Truthfully – I was skeptical at first about IPRoyal‘s residential pool. How good could 2 million home and mobile IPs be, sourced from some random bandwidth sharing app?
Boy, was I wrong to doubt them…
Because over the last year, IPRoyal‘s residential proxies have become my Swiss army knife for:
✅ Yeezy and PlayStation drops
✅ Accelerating my Scrapy crawlers
✅ Testing streaming sites and apps
Here‘s why this pool blows me away:
Flexibility – IPRoyal lets me pinpoint home IPs from specific cities or states. From 5 minute to 7 day rotations. All at a click for $7 per GB. I haven‘t found another provider matching this versatility in my price range.
Performance tests – Early on, these proxies tested pretty dismally against sites like Google and Amazon. But my latest March 2023 benchmarks show massive improvement:
| Website | Avg. Success Rate | Avg. Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 85.45% | 5.22 sec |
| 62.77% | 3.39 sec |
With failure rates below 20% on notoriously proxy-hostile sites? I‘ll take those results any day for a hobbyist!
My fellow guinea pig Devon feels the same:
As a sneaker reseller, I rely on IPRoyal‘s residential IPs multiple times weekly for drops. For $25 a month, they handle almost all my Nike, Adidas and Walmart needs. Only had one ban in 18 months using their rotating IPs with care.
Now – for more aggressive market-research scraping at scale? The pool still lacks the sheer size and scrubbing to replace my Luminati contract. But for flying under the radar and not torching budgets, IPRoyal delivers big time.
Why IPRoyal‘s Usage & Support Impress
Here‘s the crazy part after gushing about IPRoyal‘s prices and performance…
Their dashboard UI competes handily with premium services 10x the monthly cost.
Seriously – for an operational company less than 3 years old, their usage and transparency tools are remarkably polished and reliable in my experience.
A dashboard packed with usability
Right from my first IPRoyal login in 2021, the UI shows a product team sweating the details for user experience:
🌐 Multi-protocol proxies – With separate widgets to easily generate datacenter, ISP or residential lists on demand. Copy, paste, scrape!
📊 Usage stats – no fancy graphs yet, but reliable numbers on my remaining traffic and requests. Critical when every GB counts.
🗂 Subscription tracking – clean layouts showing all my active plans, invoices, costs and proxy performance metrics when available.
🪙 Wallet top-ups – for crypto advocates (or shady scrappers?), convenient direct balance loading to enable payments.
Add savvy reseller features, API access, browser extensions and more – hard to complain at IPRoyal‘s price point! Their focus on self-service pays customer experience dividends.
Responsive customer support
Let‘s face it – with freemium services so cheap, you expect corner-cutting on support too.
Well IPRoyal breaks expectations here as well. Both times I‘ve needed technical assistance or account help, they came through quickly via:
💬 Instant Chat – sub 2 minute waits to connect with agents like Kazys for standard issues
📧 Email support – for in-depth questions, detailed responses within 8 business hours
🤖 Robust documentation – guides cover most common use cases if you want to self-serve
Given the discount pricing, IPRoyal‘s white-glove service still astonishes me. They confirm the cliche – you get what you pay for!
The Verdict: My Go-To for Personal Projects
I started by asking if IPRoyal‘s budget proxies can serve serious scraping use cases. For many hobbyists and developers – the answer is a resounding yes.
Their datacenter and residential products lack enterprise refinement, true. But for most personal analytics, drops and testing needs, their performance shines. Back that with responsive support and self-serve usability to manage your scraping at scale.
Can they operate for Fortune 500 web scraping like Luminati? Not yet – the pool needs years more growth first. But already, IPRoyal‘s innovation proves proxies don‘t have to bankrupt everyday scrappers.
For me, they‘ve earned a permanent spot in my web data toolkit for the everyman. The price-to-performance ratio can‘t be beat. When people ask me where to start with proxies on a budget, IPRoyal will be my first recommendation every time!
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Chris Becker is a web data analyst with over 10 years of experience in the industry. He specializes in testing proxy performance for web scraping and other online automations. The views represented are his own based on extensive hands-on work with IPRoyal‘s proxy products.
