Luminati Review (Now is Brightdata)

Learn from our reviews why Luminati is regarded as one of the worlds largest residential proxies as well as Datacentre proxies selling service providers.

You want to browse the Internet with your identity concealed under another computer so that if websites request any system data, that of the intermediate computer is shown? What you need is a proxy service and a good number of them exist with their different twist, business models, and culture. In this article, I will be discussing one of the top proxy service providers in the market – Luminati. In fact, I can boldly tell you Luminati is the best out there.In this Luminati review, we will be taking a look at their residential proxies in terms of amount and distribution as well as security, speed, prices, and customer support among others.

Why do you even need a residential proxy in the first place? Web servers are becoming smarter by the day and one of the areas they have developed is in the area of detecting and block web requests made through proxies. Really, you might ask why would they want to do that but to them, if you are hiding your identity, there is something suspicious about you – and they have every right to think so.

Interestingly, most people that use proxy services are Internet marketers and hackers, and websites want to block these set of people because if they visit, they are either there to steal information or carryout some unwanted activities. Even though websites have developed the techniques to detect proxies, there are still some types of proxies that are undetectable. These are residential proxies and the reason behind this is the fact that requests are routed through real devices.

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An Overview of Luminati

Luminati is the world largest provider of residential proxies because it has the largest number of IP addresses in its IP pool. The number of residential IP addresses in their IP pool is over 72 million. If you add the number of residential IP addresses of its major competitors, the number is still not up to 72 million. That’s why they pride themselves as the world’s largest proxy service. The company has been named the 2023 global market leader in the enterprise IP proxy network market.

If you are using Luminati, just know that you are using a proxy service used by Fortune 500 companies – thanks to the legality of their services. Unlike the other residential service provider that uses the IP addresses of people’s devices without their consent, Luminati claimed they have the legal right to use the residential IP addresses in their pool. One of the ways they get this legal right is through their free VPN service – Hola VPN. Part of the terms and condition is that users of the free VPN service agree to share their Internet condition – this is one of the reason I will always fight against free proxy or VPN service.

When it comes to the speed of residential proxies, Luminati’s residential proxies are some of the fastest in the industry. They are also secured and reliable. With Luminati, you can do large-scale scraping and social media automation without been noticed. Luminati will do quite well with scraping Google and other forms of SEO monitoring without any form of cloaking or IP blockage. This is possible through the use of a technique known as IP rotation that can potential rotate between the over 35 million IP addresses they have.

Their prices can also be said to be fair considering the premium service they offer. Generally, they charge per bandwidth and the cost reduces as you pay for more bandwidth. They also have an excellent FAQs page that contains frequently asked questions and their answers. You can also contact them through email if there is need. However, they do not have live chat support.

Visit Luminati

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How to use Luminati proxies for web scraping

 

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Subscription Prices

If you read everything above, you will notice where I stated that they have a free VPN service known as Hola VPN. Usually, the best form of protection, anonymity, reliability, and security comes from VPN because they encrypt your data, making them useless to eavesdroppers. The question now is why would they create a VPN service and make it free and then create a proxy service and make it paid – Think! This goes in line with if you are using a service for free, you are also a product sold to someone else that will pay for the service you are enjoying for free. However, because you are paying for their Luminatiservice you are rest assured that nothing fishy is cooking below the radar.

Luminati smallest plan is the Starter Pack that sells for $500 for a month. This plan offers you a limited bandwidth of 40 GB at a price of $12.5 per gigabyte. If you exhaust your bandwidth, you have to pay to continue using their service. However, you will enjoy unlimited concurrent sessions, 99.99 percent uptime worldwide access to residential IP addresses.

If you feel you do not want to pay this amount of money until you have a test of the depth of the water, Luminati has a 7-days free trial option for you to use. However, you do not have the option of asking for a refund after purchase, this is why you need to use their 7-days free trial to see if they will be suitable for your own use case.

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Proxy Server Network and Distribution

In case you do not know, the strength of a residential IP provider to a larger extent rest on the number of their IP addresses and how spatially distributed they are. I have used proxy service that provides IP addresses in only one country and have had my own share of the bad sides. Yes, they seem to work at the time you subscribe to them because you felt they have a presence in your country of choice. But as time passes, you will discover you need to access the Internet from another location and that’s where the problem comes – you need to subscribe to another proxy provider. What is the condition of Luminati in terms of IP address size, network and distribution?

Luminati is the world’s largest proxy service provider – this does not come cheap. They have the largest reach and IP distribution around the world. Like I stated earlier, they have over 35 million residential IP address distributed in over 200 countries in the world with city-specific IP addresses distributed within 20,000 cities in the world. Interestingly, they have 300,000 datacenters in the world. If what you need are mobile IP addresses, Luminati has owner 2 million IP addresses.

The United States alone has over 1.9 million residential IP addresses. UK has over 1.7 million, India, Brazil, Canada, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and France have the largest number of IP addresses owned by Luminati. In fact, just know that there is no country in the world that Luminati does not IP addresses in. and the fact that they have legal right over the IP addresses they offer their paid residential IP address users, they have been loved by many even Fortune 500 companies that are known to use the best of services.

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Security and Reliability

How secure is the proxy you’re trying to hide under and connect to the Internet through? You need to answer this question before subscribing to a proxy plan. Really, we have been sold a lot of lies by proxy service providers and we need to cherry-pick to make sure we are making the right choice. It is no longer news that some so-called proxy service providers are mere resellers. How can a reseller guarantee you security over what they do not have control over?

Even the ones that are the owners of their proxies, how secured are their systems and infrastructures? Do they log user internet data or do they just allow it to pass like a transparent body? Does the government interfere in their activities or they are completely independent of government influence? Have they been hacked before? Or have they been found wanting in selling user data to advertisers? What’s their uptime like and how often do people complain of IP leakage because if IP addresses leaks even accidentally, the use of that particular proxy that leaked the IP becomes counterproductive.

Luminati is said to be one of the most reliable proxy service providers in the market. They have not been in the center of any controversy and not under any form of obligation to feed government with their customers data. Interestingly, they do not even save user data and their infrastructures are secured – at least for now. With an uptime of about 99.9 percent, a large pool of IP addresses distributed among countries of the world, and no history of IP leakage, Luminati is one of the most reliable residential IP addresses providers in the market.

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Luminati Internet Connection Speed

No matter how fast your Internet Service Provider (ISP) makes your Internet download and upload speed fast, a proxy service that can turn that into a joke. You read that right, yes, proxy services are not optimized for speed, they are engineered to hide your IP addresses and in doing that they have to do a lot of routing and rerouting that ends up making your connection noticeably slow. It is not uncommon to get less than half of your Internet download speed when you are using a proxy service and this becomes worse when you are using a residential proxy.

Let take a look at how fast Luminati is. Before testing the speed of Internet of Luminati residential proxies on my system, I got the speed of my Internet connection using Speedtest.net. My download speed is measured 76.54 Mbps and upload speed is 103.76 Mbps. Below are the test result of their residential proxies in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Brazil.

I have to say this; I am impressed with the result of the test result I got from the speed test. The results I got surpass my expectations. While some users of the service already stated that they got a boost in their Internet connection, I doubted. However, my result confirmed their claims.

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Authentication

Luminati has a free IP address hiding service in the form of a VPN known as Hola VPN. I have not used it before However, I know for sure that authentication is quite strict in Luminati proxy because it is paid and customers need their bandwidth protected from unauthorized use. Luminati has two ways of authentication. These include username/password authentication and IP authentication.

In username and password authentication, username and password are used for authentication. The second form of authentication is peculiar to proxy services – IP authentication. In IP authentication, users are expected to link their device IP address to their subscription so they will be allowed access.

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Customer Support

Maybe you’ve not but I have had a terrible experience getting help from some customer support personnel. While they aren’t specifically from the proxy Industry, I have had stories of how some customer support is bad. There’s a certain proxy provider that the only way to get help from them is through email. No FAQs page, no live chat. What’s the customer support of Luminati like?

Luminati has an excellent FAQs page that provides answers to frequently asked questions. They also have an email address that you can use to reach them. However, many users claimed the response wasn’t as fast as they expected. Also, they do not have a live chat service to provide instant help.

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Our Verdict – Is Luminati Recommended?

After this Luminatireview, I expect you to have a good issue of the nature of the residential IP addresses provided by Luminati. However, on a personal note, I find it to be one of the best residential proxy providers. Because of its wide coverage and the number of IP addresses it has in its pool, it has become the proxy of choice among Fortune 500 companies.

With Luminati proxies, you are assured of masking your identity and sending thousands of requests to a web server without the fear of being blocked or faced with the problem of solving captchas. Even though their support is not the best out there, I strongly recommend Luminati residential proxies.