Oxylabs Review

Oxylabs is one of the widely and leading proxy providers for web scraping, internet connection speed, pricing, proxy gateways, pools and provide the best proxies. Let take a look at a brief review of Oxylabs.

Sometimes back, someone was asking on an online forum whether Oxylabs is better than GeoSurf and Luminati. Some users claimed GeoSurf is better, others claimed Luminati is the best, and there are some Oxylabs users that claimed Oxylabs is the best. I wish to review Oxylabs so you have an overview of what they are, the services they provide, server distribution, Internet connection speed, customer support, pricing, and other features. From this Oxylabs review, you should have a mind of your own considering which is the best.

I presume you already know what a proxy is and what they are used for. If you do not know, a proxy is an intermediate server which requests are routed through them in other to conceal the identity of the computer initiating the web requests. The identity of a computer on the Internet is its IP address which is a string of numbers separated by dots. Your IP address can give glue to your geographical address and system data.

What Oxylabs does for you is that it helps you conceal and hide this IP so your location, Internet connection protocol, and your system data cannot be discovered by the websites you visit. Oxylabs has become one of the proxy server providers of choice among Internet marketers because of their reliability, security, and their pool of IP addresses. Let take a look at an overview of Oxylabs.

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An Overview Of Oxylabs

Oxylabs is one of the top proxy providers in the market. This company boast of having one of the largest collection of datacenter proxies and residential IP addresses in the world. They have also become one of the best when it comes to their server distribution as they have a presence in almost all countries and regions of the world. This makes them one of the best in the market. They offer 3 main services – datacenter proxy provision, residential proxies provision, and a crawler to help you scrap data from the Internet. However, our main focus on this review is their residential proxies.

Oxylabs is a premium service company based in Lithuania. You are assured of security and shouldn’t fear any form of eavesdropping or spamming from this company. Their servers are also one of the most reliable as they have consistently had a server uptime of at least 99 percent. Because they are premium, they aren’t used by hobbyists, small businesses, and hackers looking for playing and testing ground. They are used by real businesses that are serious about what they want.

Some of the aspects people use them include online marketing research, brand protection, travel fare aggregation, ads verification, price intelligence, SEO monitoring, product page intelligence, and email protection among others. Oxylabs prides itself as a premium proxy service for data extraction. This tells a lot about how web scraping is a key area on which it was built and how best it performs data extraction. Not surprised though, it was founded by a group of web scraping gurus.

However, just like any other great product out there, the situation is not like that of a bed of roses, there are some spines on the bed you need to be wary of. Some of these include the fact that their proxies are very expensive and the only way you can get clarification is through an email. No live chat and no Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page.

Visit Oxylabs

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Is Oxylabs=Scam?

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Subscription Prices

Just like any other commodity in the market, the price can either attract customers or repel them. In the case of the proxy market, this is worse. If you know the proxy industry well, you’ll agree with me that prices vary greatly. On one end are a group of open proxies and shared proxies that are free of charge. On the other end, you have the residential servers that you need to think economical before buying them to avoid running at a loss. The middle consists of datacenter dedicated proxies and semi-dedicated proxies that are priced moderately and appeal to a good number of proxy users.

Oxylabs is on the expensive side. This is expected though; Residential IP addresses are the most expensive. This is because they help you surf like a human as opposed to datacenter proxies that browse as a server. However, in the case of Oxylabs, the cost of a subscription is one thing that got me thrilled. Unlike other proxy providers that their pay is according to the number of IP addresses, Oxylabs charges using bandwidth. Their Basic Plan costs $600 minimum for a 50Gb bandwidth with each bandwidth sold at $12/Gb. If you exhaust your bandwidth, you can always buy a Gb for $12. $600 as a minimum is not friendly and will keep some users out. However, as you pay for more bandwidth, the price reduces.

Oxylabs does not offer a refund policy. This isn’t a problem though since they offer a 7-days free trial. Needless to say, a free trial is rare in the proxy industry. The companies have been tricked in the past and have stopped giving out free trials. However, Oxylabs remains one of the companies that still give out free trials. Considering their expensive subscription, it is logical for them to have a free trial – and they do! Getting the free trial is a slow process though, as the process is not automatic and you need to contact their support via their contact form.

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Proxy Server Network and Distribution

A lot of automation works online has to do with sending hundreds and thousands of requests in a minute to a website. Regardless of whether or not you’re using a proxy, if requests are coming from the same IP address at this rate, the website will become suspicious. At its best, it will consider the requests as bot originating and refuse to provide the needed data. At its worse, you are considered a hacker carrying out a targeted Denial of Service (DoS) attack and your IP will be blacklisted.

To avoid this, you need to change IP at time interval or session. This is known as IP rotation. IP rotation performs best when the IPs are from different locations. That’s where the network of servers and their distribution across countries come in. If a proxy provider can only provide residential IP addresses from a particular region, that provider will not be good enough for large-scale work as they do not offer the variety and mix needed to deceive a web server into thinking the requests are coming from different devices from different countries.

In this regard, Oxylabs is one of the best. According to information provided on their website, they have a network of over 30 million IP addresses distributed across all countries. This will make sure you aren’t disturbed by captchas and your IP is not blocked. While I cannot ascertain the fact that they actually have over 30 million because you’re not given the option to view each and every IP address in the pool, I can attest to the fact they have a large number of IP addresses in their collections.

They have an interactive map that shows you the number of IP addresses in a particular country when your cursor hovers over the country. In terms of the proxy entry point, Oxylabs has two entry points – sticky proxy entry point and random proxy entry point.

The sticky entry point provides you with a proxy to use every 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, you are given another one. Usually, no website will be suspicious of a 5 minutes surf from an IP address. The random entry point, on the other hand, provides you with a new IP address for every web requests you send. This means that the IP address you used in visiting a website homepage is different from the one you’ll use for logging in and the IP address keep changing.

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Oxylabs Internet Connection Speed

How fast is your Internet connection? No matter how fast your Internet speed is, a proxy is sure to reduce it. In some, the reduction is minimal, in others, the reduction is so great that you will notice and begin to complain. For residential proxies, the reduction is huge and this isn’t without a reason; Residential proxies have to reroute requests through residential proxies which will be subjected to the speed provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This does not happen in datacenter proxies.

To effectively test the speed of Oxylabs residential proxy, I had to test my Internet connection speed without a proxy so I could have a base measurement to use to ascertain if their connection is fast or slow. I tested my internet connection using Speedtest.net. My download speed 52.45 Mbps while my upload speed is 97.67 Mbps. Below is a table showing my test using residential proxies provided by Oxylabs.

Looking at the data presented in the table above, you will agree with me that Oxylabs is not very fast in terms of Internet connection speed. However, in most cases, you would be using it for downloading large files but for automation works that fast download speed isn’t that important.

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Security and Reliability

How secure and reliable a proxy is important when reviewing a proxy. You know why? A proxy not good in either of the two factors is not fit for use. Believe you me, I would rather surf the Internet with my IP address shown than use a proxy service that my security is not guaranteed and IP address is leaked. The Internet is a horrible place, no doubt. But adding an unsecured proxy into the mix makes it complicated. We have heard stories of how proxy providers have turned themselves into eavesdroppers. We have also heard stories of how some proxy providers have been hacked and their customers’ data used.

Oxylabs have not been found wanting in any of these. They have not been hacked in the past since the company was founded in 2013 and have not been in the controversy of eavesdropping on their users. They work on a strict no-logging policy. Your browsing data is not logged, it simply means that they only route your requests through their servers and get you the responses – data routed through them aren’t saved. Their infrastructures are state-of-the-art with industrial experts monitoring to prevent any form of security breakdowns.

Also, when it comes to reliability, you have to give it to Oxylabs. Because of the large number of IP addresses in their IP pool and the fact that they are residential IP addresses, you do not have any fear of your IP leaking or websites blocking their IP address. Remember, I stated that this company was founded by web scraping experts – they know the ins and outs of large-scale automation and have built their service on that basis. With over 30 million residential IP addresses in a different part of the world, their IP addresses are enough to deceive any smart web server and allow them access.

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Authentication

Oxylabs is a paid proxy server provider. Because it is paid, their proxies are locked and only accessible to customers that pay for them. The only way to unlock them is to prove you’ve paid for them and that can be done in two ways – username and password authentication as well as IP authentication

• Username and Password Authentication

Username/password authentication has been in existence for long. In fact, it is arguably the most common type of authentication and what almost all websites and applications use. However, the cases of having to remember passwords and the vulnerability of passwords to guessing through the use of brute-force techniques are making them lose popularity by the day. You can still use them in Oxylabs for authentication purposes.

• IP Authentication

IP authentication is peculiar to proxy services. They are also known as whitelisting IP addresses. In this type of authentication, you register your device IP address in the IP Manager section of your dashboard. If any request is made through that registered IP address, no username and password will be requested. This is becoming popular among proxy providers by the day.

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Customer Support

No matter how great a product is and how intuitive its usage is, customers will still run into problems and will need clarifications. Some of the problems might be what you need common sense to tackle but really, there’s a saying that sense is never common. What seems normal to you might not be normal to me – we are conditioned by different factors. However, if a company is there to answer customers’ queries, help them in activations, and communicate effectively with their customers, such a company will be loved by its customers.

Oxylabs flops in this regard. The only way to reach them is through email communication which for reasons known to them is terribly slow. Like I stated earlier, I am using their 7-days free trial for this Oxylabs reviews. Activation isn’t automatic. You need to contact them via their contact form and that slows down the whole process. However, their replies usually hit the nail on the head and make things right. If only they can add a live support feature and a FAQs page to make getting help faster and easier for their customers.

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Our verdict – Is Oxylabs recommended?

Will I recommend Oxylabs to my readers? Absolutely, I will. In fact, if I will engage in data extraction from the web, SEO monitoring, brand protection, ads verification, and email protection, they should be on top of my list of choices. The only problems associated with Oxylabs is their expensive plans and their customer support that is done only true email.

However, if you can pay for their service, you will not regret using them. This is because their residential IP addresses are over 30 million, which makes IP rotation more effective and prevent any form of IP blocking and captchas.