The Asocks service is a small proxy user-focused provider that has been on my radar for a while now. Today, it is time to do an in-depth review of the service and discover why it has such a great review profile and comments on review sites like Trustpilot and G2.
The review will entail details of our research as well as performance tests carried out by our team to ascertain how well the proxies perform in a good number of ways. Before going into the Asocks review in detail, let's set the background by taking a look at the service first.
An Overview of Asocks
Asocks is a small proxy provider, known for residential proxies and mobile proxies. The service is based in the United States and subject to the rule of law there. The customers of this service are majorly small Internet marketers and those interested in automation be it general web automation, social media, or even SEO.
And if you take a look at the pricing, you will see how it pays-as-you-go payment option and cheap price per GB makes it the perfect provider for those looking for the cheapest residential or mobile proxies to work with that actually works. It is also the only provider that both the residential and mobile proxies share the same price per GB.
| Parameter | Feature |
| IP Type | Residential/Mobile |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | $3 for 1GB (Monthly) |
| Pool Of IPs | 7+ Million |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP and SOCKS5 |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Countries and Cities |
| Authentication | IP Authentication and Username/Password |
| Speed | Average |
| Free Trial | Yes |
| Refund Policy | 3 days |
| Support | Telegram, Ticket, and Email |
| Jurisdiction Location | United States |
Proxy Types
The Asocks service does offer two types of proxies only — the residential proxies and mobile proxies. Both of which are rotating proxies. Let's take a look at each of them briefly below.
Rotating Residential Proxies
Their most popular product is the rotating residential proxy network. With this, you get a unique residential IP assigned to you theoretically after every request. According to the information on their website, they have 7 million IPs but they didn’t specifically state how many of them are residential or mobile.
Being rotating proxies that get a new IP after every request, you get the power to avoid getting blocked as you don’t even exceed the request limits that will lead to blocks. This is what makes them the perfect proxies for web scraping and everything in it such as ad verification, SEO scraping, price comparison, load testing, and marketing research.
Aside from its support for high-rotating proxies, it also offers sticky ports that will maintain sessions for up to 30 minutes. The rotation period is flexible and customizable. This feature is especially useful for tasks that need to maintain sessions such as account management tasks. It is this feature that makes it good for social media marketing, e-commerce, and even unlocking content.
In terms of pricing, Asocks residential proxies offer the cheapest price per GB for proxies that work. For this service, all you have is the pay-as-you-go payment option — not packaged plans. The price per GB is $3 with a month's validity. It does not have a discount no matter the amount of GB you need. I don’t see this as a problem as it is already too cheap to be discounted. However, there is a free trial plan available for users.
Rotating Mobile Proxies
The other proxies you can get from this service are mobile proxies which are also rotating proxies that change your IP after every request. This can pose a problem of choice to you as you don’t know whether to go with their mobile proxies or residential proxies since they have the same pricing and features.
Well, you need to know that mobile proxies offer the highest form of protection against blocks and have more chances of being undetected. It is this quality that makes them a great choice against some of the most difficult-to-access sites such as LinkedIn. Another advantage of using mobile proxies over residential proxies is that they give your requests a mobile footprint which earns you more trust with mobile social media platforms like TikTok and Snapchat.
However, you need to know that mobile proxies are a lot slower, and as such, except if you actually do need them which is only true for social media tasks, you are better off going for their residential proxies for their speed advantage. In terms of pricing, their mobile proxies share the same pricing structure as the residential proxies — $3 per GB. For a mobile proxy network, this is the cheapest you will get and so far, you pay for it via the pay-as-you-go model too.
Residential Proxy Features
The main focus in this review is on their residential proxies and that is what I will focus on from now on. In this section of the review, let’s take a look at some of its most interesting features below.
Small Provider with a Sizable IP Pool and Good Location Coverage
From the pricing and copy on their website, you can tell the Asocs service was set up for small proxy users. However, it has done a good job at making sure the small proxy users don’t lack the most important thing they will need, actually putting them in a head-to-head battle with even the top providers when it comes to meeting the needs of small proxy users. This service has over 7 million IPs which technically, should meet the needs of small proxy users.
I do know not all of these 7 million IPs are available at any given type. However, the result from the performance test showed us how well it still performs in terms of IP duplication rate. Interestingly, the service didn’t just get it right in just IP pool size, it also got it right in location coverage. The service has IPs from over 150 countries across the globe. This is great location support for small proxy providers.
No Monthly Commitment
Some providers in the residential proxy market are fond of getting you to purchase more bandwidth than you need and then pegging the validity period to a month, making you waste money when you should be saving it. The Asocks service is one of the proxy services that don’t box you into any monthly monetary commitment — you pay as you go, a model known as pay-as-you-go.
The pricing for their bandwidth is $3 per GB and this is the cheapest you will get. For this reason, there is no discount available regardless of the amount of bandwidth you purchase. It might also interest you to know that this same pricing model and price is what their mobile proxies use. Currently, Asocks is the only proxy provider that both residential and mobile proxies share the same price tag.
Easy to Register
The de facto rule in the residential proxy market is that you can’t just register and start using them. For most, you need to go through their KYC process with some of them even making the procedure manual. For a service like Bright Data, the KYC is based on a schedule with their agents.
But for Asocks, all of these are taking off you. All you need to do is register for an account and purchase the plan you need — no need for verification or KYC as they are called. Interestingly, even the registration process has been made easier for you as they request only a few details from you. If you want, you can use an easier option to register by signing up using your Gmail account.
Free Trial and Bonus Available
Some marketers have been burnt a lot in the past and they want to be sure a proxy service will work for them before spending their money on. The Asocks service is one of those services that provides a free trial to its customers to try out their service.
And yes, you get to enjoy the free trial offer without doing KYC so all of the hurdles to stop you from enjoying the trial have been removed. Also important is the service support bonus. As a user, you can enjoy up to 3GB of bonus provided you meet their requirement. Speak to their custom support team to know how to get this.
Residential Proxy Performance
While things look good from the feature perspective, it is time to take a look at the performance to tell whether their proxies are good at performance or it is just cheap for nothing.
Proxy IP Geo Test
Asocks has over 7 million IPs in its pool. While that is commendable for a small proxy provider, the actual distribution of those IPs location-wise is also important. This will give you details on whether you can use their service for geo-target scraping that needs IPs only from the US or not.
I used the US here as the example, but the general thing to note here is, that we want to find out the major countries captured in their pool as that will tell you the actual locations you can use their proxies for in case of geo-location tasks. Below is the distribution of their proxies.
From the above, you can see that about 2.52% of their pools are from the United States. This is about 177K from their pool. They have the highest number of IPs from Russia — over 248K. With this number of IPs from the US, one can say the number is great for small tasks but can’t be recommended for large scraping tasks as too many duplicate IPs will be reassigned within a short period of time.
For most of the other locations, it can be said that Asocks does not have sizeable pools for them and as such, except your task needs only hundreds of thousands of IPs, you are better off using another provider. In essence, while Asocks is great when geo-location targeting is not used.
Proxy Success Rate Test
Th success rate of a proxy is how many percent of requests you send via its network will succeed. Because different sites have different anti-spam systems protecting them with different levels of effectiveness, it is important this test is carried out on multiple sites to get a true average we can work with. We chose over 10 top popular sites targeted by web scrapers and sent over 300 concurrent requests a good number of times. Below is the result shown in a chart.
From the test carried out, we obtained an average success rate of 84.5% with the average success rate of some sites going as high as 89% while that of some going as low as 76%. Generally, Asocks seems to be doing worse when it comes to accessing Google products (Search and YouTube).
It performs excellently well on e-commerce sites while the success rate is good for social media platforms. On a general note, the success rate is an acceptable one even though there is still some room for improvement. However, the specifics should help you make a more informed decision.
Response Time Test
The success rate as stated earlier is good. What about the response time, is it fast enough? It is a known fact that residential proxies can be the bottleneck in your application if you go with the wrong provider. So, a response time test is required to find out whether a provider is fast enough for your project type and size. We did carry out a response time test and below is the result of the test carried out.
The average response time of Asocks residential proxies is 1.31 seconds — this is even faster than Netnut, a renowned provider with a focus on enterprise users. No doubt, this measured result is not the best and there is certainly room for improvement. However, it can be said that the speed is acceptable. If you are looking for a provider that will provide you with real fast speed, then your options are Bright Data, Nimbleway, Smartproxy, and Soax.
Unique IP Test
Web scraping is one of the major use cases of residential proxies and for this, the more unique IP addresses you are able to get, the higher the chances of you remaining undetectable until you are done scraping. The unique IP test reveals how many percent of the IPs assigned to you after each request are actually unique. Below is the result of this test carried out on the popular providers in the market.
As you can see from the chart above, the duplicate rate for Asocks residential proxies is 30.35%. To give a little bit of context, over 500K requests were sent and no specific geolocation or parameter was set in other to get the true duplicate rate.
The obtained duplicate rate for a small proxy provider for small proxy usage is acceptable since you won’t be operating on a large scale. However, if you want a better rate especially for mid to large-scale projects, then Bright Data or Smartproxy will be a better option.
How to Use Asocks
The Asocks service has been designed to be easy to use. It is one of the residential proxies that does not require KYC. For registration, you can just sign up using your Google account and a free trial and bonus awaits you. One thing you will come to like about this service is how minimalistic its user interface is.
From the dashboard, you can purchase proxies, check your balance, and get your proxy details. To get the proxy credential, you will need to create one. You can do that by going to the Generate Proxy Port tab.
From that interface, choose the residential proxy icon, to choose the specific location you need IPs from if your tasks have a geo-location requirement or leave it at all, and also choose the authorization type. The tool allows you to choose the number of IP: ports you want to create. After generating the number of proxies you need, you can now use the proxies and their associated authorization method in the client software you need it for.
Customer Support
Customer support is an integral part of service delivery and many proxy providers have a dedicated team for that and invest a lot into it. Is Asocks one of those services or does it neglect that important part of the proxy business? Well, one can’t say customer support is not important to them.
However, it can also be argued that customer support is an oversight to them. First, if you visit their website, you will see an icon for live chat support. If you click it, you are taken to Telegram. This is a red flag to me. But that is not all.
The Telegram channel you are taken to is actually a bot. But I did get connected to an agent who provided the answer in a minute. While this was easier for me because I have Telegram installed, it might not be the same for those who don’t have Telegram.
If you want better customer support delivery, then you will have to contact them via email. However, this will take a few hours as my experience using them was an average of 3 hours. If you are ready to wait that long, then you can go ahead and make use of them.
Source of IP
The Asocks residential proxies do not own the IPs they use. The IPs are gotten via P2P networks where independent user devices and their resources are used to route requests of their clients. The big question is whether this is ethical and legal. This is ethical and legal provided the owner of the device gave his consent and he is aware of what his device resources will be used for.
In reality, not many P2P operators give the full details or make the details easy to find and understand. The Asocks service is cryptic about this information, making it difficult for us to tell whether their IPs are sourced via ethical means or not. However, considering their service allows usage without KYC, the service might not be leaning towards the ethical side of things.
Do We Recommend Asocks
Asocks has attractive pricing that will make you want to use their residential proxies or even mobile proxies. However, you shouldn’t get carried away by how much you will save. This service should only be used for small scraping projects. I wouldn’t recommend Asocks for large scraping projects as it won’t deliver as expected.
Also, this provider is not the best for use when there is a locational requirement except if the geo-location you need is one of the popular countries in their pool.
Alternatives to Asocks
From the above, some of you readers will find a reason or two that will make you not want to use the Asocks residential proxies. If you are one of them, then take a look at one of the alternatives below.
Smartproxy
Recommended for better overall performance. This provider is a premium provider and offers you better performance in terms of scraping success, response time, and even unique IP rate. It also has better session control with more location support. Its customer support is also miles ahead but it will cost you a little more to use their service than Asocks.
Bright Data
Recommended for larger IP pool and location coverage needs. If your project is a large one, the Asocks pool of over 7 million is not the best for you. Instead, you can use Bright Data which has a pool of 72 million IPs (about 10 times bigger). It also has better location coverage and better session control than Asocks. However, the KYC can keep you waiting for days and pricing also costs more than Asocks.
Soax
Recommended for a higher success rate. This provider has one of the cleanest pools in the market as it regularly monitors its pool and removes the bad IPs. This brings down the connection errors and drops connections which in turn raises the success rate.
It also has granular geo-targeting support which makes it great for tasks that need IPs from specific states and cities. However, this is the most expensive of the alternatives as it costs $99 to get started with them.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 8.9/10
8.9/10
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Proxy Network - 9/10
9/10
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Proxy Functions - 9.1/10
9.1/10
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Customer support - 7.8/10
7.8/10
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