DataImpulse Review

When it comes to cheap residential proxies that work, DataImpulse is a good candidate but before you go ahead to purchase proxies from them, you should read our honest review in the form of pros and cons.

To be honest with you, what really caught my attention about DataImpulse service is its cheap pricing — imagine buying 1GB for $1. Well, as a proxy reviewer, there is more to a proxy service than being cheap enough for everyone to afford.

For a residential proxy service, the size of its pool, location coverage, IP rotation, speed, and other features mentioned here are all important. How does the DataImpulse service stand in the other features that matter too? That is the answer this DataImpulse review article seeks to provide.

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An Overview of DataImpulse

The DataImpulse service offers proxies in multiple proxy categories including mobile, residential, and datacenter. The focus here is their residential proxy network which is basically a rotating proxy network. There are over 5 million IP addresses with a location coverage of over 100 countries. It does have support for country-level geo-targeting for popular countries in its network. Its support for session management together with IP rotation makes its usage diverse.

However, it also has issues, ranging from not supporting city-level targeting to having a list of websites blocked by default, among others. The review is divided into a pros and cons section and I advise you to read both sections before deciding on whether to buy or not.

Visit DataImpulse.com

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DataImpulse Pros

The DataImpulse service does have its core strengths that not only differentiate it from other services but also keep its users loyal. Let’s take a look at some of these below.

Cheapest Residential Proxies on the Market

If there is only one reason proxy users will choose DataImpulse over other providers, then the reason has to be because of pricing. The service offers the cheapest residential proxies you can buy and know it will work. It beats all previous benchmarks of cheap proxies including the likes of Proxy-cheap and Hydraproxy whose pricing starts from $5 and can go as low as $3 per GB depending on the package you subscribe to. Generally, the average price per GB in the market is $5 – $10.

However, DataImpulse GB costs $1 per GB and if you subscribe to their $800 plan, you can get it at $0.8 per GB. It is important you know that, unlike most other providers including the top providers like Bright Data and Smartproxy, DataImpulse does not support a real pay-as-you-go model as they will want you to believe on their website.

Their proxy plans are bundled and the smallest plan you can purchase comes with 5GB for $5. Even at this, it is still the most affordable. Also interesting is that its bandwidth does not expire as that of other providers. This makes it great for those who have unpredictable and irregular usage of proxies.

Sizeable IP Pool for Small to Mid-Scale Tasks

With all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend the DataImpulse service for large projects as it has a small proxy pool. The service currently has over 5 million IP addresses which is enough for small to mid-scale scraping projects.

Even though you can’t potentially have all the 5 million IPs to yourself as there are other users of the network and not all of the IPs are active at a time, it is enough to get most scraping jobs done within the mid-scale to small-scale area done. It rotates IPs after every request, giving you access to hundreds of thousands of IPs to use.

However, when it comes to large-scale projects, the pool is small. It is not like you can’t use it, but IP rotation will be inefficient as too many IPs will be repeated more than required and that could get you blocked. The only way for you to use this for large-scale tasks is if you have a built-in system that monitors the IPs assigned and requests reassignment if an IP has already been used enough. There is also the issue of speed which the DataImpulse service still has some room for improvement.

Acceptable Proxy Speed

Speed is an important factor when choosing a proxy server. The last time I reviewed the DataImpulse service, the performance was terrible in this regard. However, the recent test and the last one I carried out before writing this review turned out to be positive.

First, you need to see my Internet connection speed without using any proxy server. This will be used as a benchmark to determine whether their proxies are fast or not. If your speed is faster than mine, I expect the proxy speed of DataImpulse residential proxies will also be.

As you can see above, my Internet speed is not one of the fastest. However, this is something we can use. Below is the speed result when I have their proxies configured.

As you can see above, I recorded a download speed of 18.21 Mbps and an upload speed of 12.85 Mbps. This speed value is considered average and acceptable as far as residential proxies are concerned. Remember, you could have a faster speed if your Internet connectivity is faster than mine.

Offer Both Rotating and Sticky Ports

The DataImpulse service has a variety of uses you can put your residential proxies into. This is because they offer you both rotating and sticky ports. For the rotating ports, the IPs assigned to you are randomly assigned after every request. That kind of setup is great for web scraping and any other automation task that does not require you to maintain a session. It is important you know that even though the service seeks to change your IPs after every request, not all of the requests will have a unique IP due to the small nature of their pool.

It is for this reason I recommend this only for small and mid-scale web scraping projects. When you have a task that session needs to be maintained as in the case of managing accounts, then rotating proxies will not work. This service does not provide you with a static IP address you can use for as long as you want. Instead, it offers you a sticky port that will maintain an IP address for up to 120 minutes. Generally, it gives you full control over your session, allowing you to set the rotation time from between 0 to 120 minutes.

However, it makes no guarantee that an IP will be assigned to you for the period you set. In fact, the service advises you to keep the rotation to 30 minutes and under that benchmark.

Responsive Customer Support

Customer support is an integral part of a business and considering some things are not clear from checking out the websites of proxy providers, you can’t afford to use a service with below-average customer support. Let me make a disclaimer here — I have only used their customer support twice and basing my customer support review on that. For the two times I contacted their customer support via live chat, the response was swift.

At first, it seemed I was on to a bot but immediately I requested to be connected to a human agent, I was connected to one in less than 3 minutes. The response from the agents was helpful and did get my issues resolved. However, they are not always online. In situations where they are not online, the support bot requests for your email address through which the agents can reach you when they come online. Except in rare situations, they should reach out to us within a few hours.

Except for technical know-how, I will rank their customer support better than what is obtainable from most providers. In fact, it is in the league of Bright Data and Smartproxy in terms of customer support.

Easy to Use

Another area you will come to like the DataImpulse service is its ease of usage in almost all scenarios. First, unlike Bright Data, Smartproxy, Nimble IP, Netnut, Oxylabs, and most other top providers that require you to go through a compulsory KYC process that does not provide you immediate access, there is no KYC here. This means you can register at any time and begin to use their service immediately. Also important is how simple and minimalist their user dashboard looks and feels.

While I do feel it is somehow clumsy because of the design, the steps you have to take to get the proxy credentials are minimal. From the user dashboard, you are able to set the geo-location option which supports only country-level targeting. Other configurations done from the user dashboard include IP rotation timing, anonymous IP filtering, and IP protocol of proxy. There is a proxy list generator you can use to generate the number of proxy endpoints at no extra charge.

When it comes to ease of payment, it is also one of the easiest options to pay for its proxies. It supports multiple payment methods which include Visa & MasterCard cards, wire transfers, PayPal, and cryptocurrency. It is important you know that payments via crypto are not eligible for refund.

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DataImpulse Cons

While the pricing and other offerings of this service are too good to be true, there are some things you need to be wary of before making a purchase decision. Let’s take a look at some of them below.

Not all the Proxies are Anonymous Proxies

When you decide to use proxies in most cases, what you actually need are highly anonymous proxies that will not only mask your real IP address but also hide the fact that they are proxies. This is because most websites do not support accessing their service via proxies. For most providers we have reviewed on this blog including small and cheaper providers like Proxy-cheap and Hydraproxy, what you get are highly anonymous proxies.

You will expect that is the minimum every other provider will offer. Unfortunately, this is not the case and the DataImpulse service is one of the exceptions. For this service, not all of the proxies are anonymous proxies. It offers an anonymous filtering setting that when turned ON, your requests are routed through only anonymous proxies. However, this is not the default and there is a downside to using this setting.

When you turn it ON, the number of IPs available to you shrinks considerably — this is even mentioned in the user dashboard. If you consider this, then you can tell the actual usable IPs in their pool are not really up to the 5 million they claim to offer.

IP Pool for Individual Countries is Small

There are over 100 countries in the list of countries you can get IPs from. This number looks great and portrays it as a service that has extensive location coverage. However, once you dig deeper to check the number of IPs from specific countries, you will discover how bad country-level targeting can be. Except for a few countries that are not up to 40, for most other countries, the actual number of IPs readily available for use is quite minutes, too small for any reasonable task.

Take, for instance, as at the time of writing this, only about 105 IPs are available for us from Belgium, 3500 from Germany, 855 IPs from France, and 1648 from Spain. Even for the top countries, there is also a small number of IPs. For instance, there are only about 11K IPs active at the time of writing this review. If you put this into perspective, you will come to terms with the fact that there is actually no 5 million pool of IP addresses you can use at any time.

That number includes the number of inactive IPs they have. Generally, I wouldn’t use this service for tasks that require geo-targeting even at the country level. Sadly, it does not even have support for city-level targeting.

Some Websites Are Blocked By Default

Here is the shocker you will have to deal with — not all sites are accessible using their proxies. The DataImpulse service has a list of sites it blocked and does not allow its users to access using their proxies. The list of blocked sites includes all government domains, SMTP and IMAP ports, Ticketswap service, and banking/payment websites. It even maintains a list of close to 3K financial and payment websites that you can’t access. You can check out the list and see if your target financial website is included here.

This is limiting in some ways as there are some government websites that hold data you will be interested in and for some reason, the DataImpulse service will not allow you to use their service to access the government website. For this reason, you should make sure your target site is not included in the blocked list of sites before making a purchase.

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Do I Recommend DataImpulse?

DataImpulse has good reviews and from afar, I thought it was because of its cheap pricing. However, I have come to see why — it has an acceptable speed, it has a pool enough for small tasks which are usually when cheap proxies are required, and also does have responsive customer support.

For these reasons, DataImpulse is recommended. However, you need to take the cons into account as they are not usable on some sites, and the pool for specific countries is too small to automate tasks at any reasonable scale.

Here are the best alternatives for DataImpulse:

• SOAX: Extensive IP pool with precise geolocation features
• Bright Data: The most advanced residential proxies for large-scale task
• SimplyNode: Premium residential proxy with affordable pricing

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