Do you want to buy residential proxies from the IPRoyal proxy service? If you answer yes to this question, then I will advise you to read our expert review to discuss the performance of their residential proxies before making a buying decision.
The IPRoyal service is one of the providers that came with its own unique twist. The twist this provider brought to the table is that its bandwidth never expires until you consume it.
This is quite great for non-heavy and non-frequent proxy users. But is this enough for you to pitch your tent with them and make them your proxy provider? The answer to this question will be answered in this IPRoyal review article. In this review, you will learn all you need to know about the IPRoyal service, especially regarding their residential and its automation capabilities and target customers.
An Overview of IPRoyal
The IPRoyal service is one of the small proxy providers with its headquarters in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I was aware of when it was introduced and its journey including when it had the cheapest pricing in the market before adjusting it and then introducing the bandwidth never expire feature.
The service is a reputable one and can be said to be one of the services that source its IPs via ethical means. The service proxies in most of the proxy categories and also offers some free tools such as browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox as well as a proxy tester.
The IPRoyal service has proxies in most of the proxy categories including residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies. Let’s take a look at their proxy offerings and what they are best used for.
Residential Proxies
For their residential proxies, IPRoyal has one thing to tell you: no more blocks or restrictions. Well, these are rotating residential proxies that will change IP for you after every request. The network is powered by over 2 million residential IPs sourced via an in-house P2P network from about 195 countries across the globe.
The IPs are ethically sourced and undetectable to most websites. The main use cases for these proxies are web scraping tasks such as stock market data collection, travel price aggregation, e-commerce scraping, and social media scraping.
The pool size of 2 million is a small one and as such, I will only recommend their proxies for small scraping tasks. Those with a large scraping project that will need hundreds of thousands of proxies would do better by using a provider with a larger pool. Aside from its rotating feature, it also supports sticky ports that will maintain the session for a period of time before switching IP. These are session proxies and can be used for account management.
In terms of pricing, their residential proxies will cost you $7 per GB at first. However, if you purchase more bandwidth, you get discount with a mouth-watery discount for bulk purchases. At first, $7 per GB does not look competitive since Proxy-cheap and HydraProxy, a few other providers cost less and have more pool than this provider. But if you look at its bandwidth never expire feature, you can tell the price is worth it.
Static Residential Proxies (ISP)
IPRoyal offers static residential proxies. Unlike their rotating counterparts, you can maintain sessions for as long as you want with these ones. They are also known as ISP proxies since the IPs are sourced directly from ISPs as opposed to getting them via P2P which rotating residential proxies are known for.
For this one, you will need to choose the location you want IPs from at the point of purchase and there are 21 countries you can choose from. The ISPs used by IPRoyal are premium ISPs and allow you to enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
These proxies offer you only dedicated proxies. They are best used for high-speed streaming on platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime. You can also use it to manage accounts on social and e-commerce platforms. It does well at unlocking geo-restricted sites and all kinds of session management.
The proxies are priced based on a number of ports and pricing starts from $2.70 per IP which is considered cheap. There is support for durations longer than one month and shorter than one month too.
Mobile Proxies
Unlike in the case of the rotating proxies that support SOCKS5, mobile proxies support only HTTP and HTTPS. These proxies are rotating mobile proxies with 1 million IPs in the pool. There is support for you to instantly change the IP assigned to you or set it to auto-rotate for you.
But the IPs are not high rotating, the default configuration is sticky sessions. These proxies cost a lot more than residential proxies and for that reason, you should only use them for tasks you can’t use residential proxies. The only major use case for these proxies is social media account management and automation.
The pricing is based on port and for 30 days, you will have to pay $130 per proxy. The location support for this is limited as there are only 5 countries to choose from — United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, and Lithuania.
Datacenter Proxies
The datacenter proxies are not as popular as their residential proxies. However, they are equally important proxies, especially for tasks where speed is required as they are the fastest proxies you can get from this provider. To start with, these proxies allow you to enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
The major problem with them is that they can easily get detected as they are datacenter IPs, what some will want to call hosting IPs. Some of the popular websites block them by default as they don’t have much reputation but spam.
But for the ones provided that IPRoyal, the spam score is low but we still don’t recommend you use them on popular sites. If your target is not popular on a global scale, you can use these proxies on them. They are also a good choice for online gaming and streaming. In terms of pricing, IPRoyal datacenter proxies are quite affordable at $1.75 per proxy. You have a choice of 30+ countries at the point of purchase.
Sneaker Proxies
These are the only specialized proxies offered by IPRoyal. These proxies are ISP proxies (static residential) but have been engineered especially for sneaker copping. You can use them with your favorite sneaker bots to cop pairs on any sneaker site. These proxies offer you unlimited bandwidth and sessions.
However, when it comes to sneaker copping, you need an IP per account you want to use. So if you need to cop 10 pairs of sneakers from a Supreme sneaker site, you will need to create 10 accounts on the site and then for each account, you will pair it with a sneaker proxy from IPRoyal (10 sneaker proxies in total).
Good enough, these proxies are cheap and flexible. You can purchase a daily sneaker proxy for $1 per proxy. However, it is actually cheap when you buy for a longer duration like one month or longer. For a month, you get a sneaker proxy for $1.80.
Residential Proxy Features
From now on in the review, the focus will be on their residential proxies. In this section, we will take a look at some of the features that make it a good service to use.
Good Location Coverage
The IPRoyal service does not have a place when we talk of services that have a large pool. At 2 million IPs it is one of the smallest residential pools we have reviewed. However, what it does not get in pool size, it has to some extent in location coverage. This service has support for about 195 countries — that is, you can get IPs from 195 countries across the globe. This makes it perfect for geo-targeted content access.
However, you need to know one thing, even though it has good location coverage, it does not have a sizeable pool for each of the 195 countries it supports. In fact, aside from the US and a few other countries, you won’t be getting many IPs to power your web scraper at any reasonable scale. But when you just need it to assign you IPs from different countries randomly to escape detection and suspicion, then IPRoyal is a good choice, especially for small projects.
IP Auto-Rotation and Sticky Ports Supported
There are two modes supported in terms of IP rotation — rotating and session proxies. If you choose the rotating proxies, then you get the IP assigned to you changed after every rotation period which you choose to be either 1, 10, or 30 minutes. For web scraping, you are better of leaving it at 1 minute. 10 to 30 minutes is for short-term session management tasks like social network automation.
The other mode is the sticky proxies. With this, an IP is assigned to you for an extended period of time and this can last up to 24 hours. Again, this is a mode for session management tasks like account management. However, this is used if you need to maintain a longer session.
No Minimum Monetary Commitment
The IPRoyal service as stated earlier is a service for the small proxy market even though there is support for large proxy users. This assertion is not from them, I made it up by looking at their pool size and pricing. Looking at the pricing, you will see that you are not boxed into purchasing bandwidth you will not use. It operates on a pay-as-you-go basis and you can purchase even 1GB from them.
However, discount awaits those who purchase more bandwidth or for longer duration from them. Generally, you get to purchase what you need and nothing more which makes it a great choice for small proxy users who just need to get a few hundred of pages scraped and don’t have the need to purchase more bandwidth.
Traffic Never Expire
In the residential proxy market, the rotating proxies are priced mostly based on bandwidth and this bandwidth expires usually after 30 days — for some, it can be lower or higher. Some providers offer rollover support where your bandwidth expires but you can roll it over to the next month when you subscribe. In the case of IPRoyal, you don’t have any of these to deal with. This is because bandwidth never expires until you use it.
With this feature, if you want to stick to them for the long term, you can purchase more bandwidth to get the mouth-watery discount and then use it until you exhaust the bandwidth before purchasing a new plan again, a good way of saving if you ask me. But make sure their proxies are well suited for your tasks first, as asking and getting a refund is not as easy as it sounds.
Residential Proxy Performance
Now to the sauce of this review — performance test result. We do know that what is written on the website of proxy providers is not usually the case especially as it relates to performance. It is for this reason that we test IPRoyal residential proxies and present you the result below.
Proxy IP Geo Test
In the feature section, I mentioned that the IPRoyal service has IPs from 195 countries. What I didn’t tell you is that each of the countries does not contribute equally to the 2+ million IPs in their pool. While some countries have over 100K IPs in the pool, the IPs from other countries are less than 10K.
And as a web scraper, this is an important feature especially if your tasks have geo-targeting requirements. You will want to find out the locations where it has a sizeable IP as those are the locations where IP rotation can be effective for web scraping. Below is a chart showing the distribution of their IPs among the top supported countries.
From the above chart, you can see that the United States accounts for 17% of their IPs when only the top 2 countries are considered. And as you will come to find out, this is just a little over 340K IPs. Is this big enough for large-scale projects? No, but for small to mid-scale projects, it is a good one.
If you also work out the values of the other top providers, you will discover that Brazil, Spain, Philippines, Japan, Germany, and Vietnam are other countries that have over 100K in the pool from. For the United Kingdom, it has about 99K.
In all, you can see that aside from the United States and a few other countries, IPRoyal does not have as many IPs as it should in other locations. As such, if your task is a geo-location requirement, using an alternative will be the better option for you.
Proxy Success Rate Test
Most proxy providers will claim to offer a 99.99% success rate. But I want you to prepare your mind and see that as nothing but a marketing gimmick — not all of your requests will succeed and the success rate even for the best provider is not 99%. Most will be around 77% to 90%. So where does IPRoyal stand in this case?
To test this, we sent 300 concurrent requests multiple times enough to get a real value we can work with from a VPS in Los Angeles. Below is the result as tested on some of the world’s most popular websites — they are also some of the most difficult sites to scrape on a large scale.
The average success rate is not obvious by merely looking at the chart, but it is 87.2%. This value I will say is a good one for a small proxy provider considering the number of concurrent requests sent. Its best performance in this regard was against Bing, Booking, Instagram, Nike, Craigslist, LinkedIn, and Amazon.
The below-average performance was from Google and YouTube at around 83% – 84%. Looking at the target sites these proxies were tested on and it worked, you can tell scraping moat other sites not in this class will be an easy job since they are some of the most difficult sites to scrape currently.
Response Time Test
Residential proxies are known to be slow and will constitute to the bottlenecks in your project. However, even among the residential proxies, there are some that are fast enough not to cause a major delay before returning a response. These are the ones that can be said to be fast.
We carried out a response time test against some of the popular residential proxies in the market and the result we got from a long spectrum of between 0.48 to 3.75. Where does IPRoyal stand in this regard?
From the chart above, the average response time of IPRoyal proxies is 1.23 seconds. This is not one of the fastest in the market but certainly not one of the slowest either. I will say this is fast enough, especially for small-scale web scraping projects. If you have a time-critical use case though, you might want to use one of the fastest as shown in the chart above. But for regular use cases, this service is fast enough to get your job done.
Unique IP Test
Rotating residential proxies rotate IPs for you — that’s their job and one of the reasons we use them. Many will promise to provide you new IP for every request. In reality, there is no service that will provide you 100% unique IPs especially if your project is fairly large.
To test how many percent of the IPs assigned to us have already been assigned, we do the unique IP test by sending one 500K web request with not just IPRoyal proxies but with proxies from other providers to see how it performs compared to the others. Below is the result of the test carried out.
The chart above shows the results obtained for the unique IP test. As you can see above, about 20.48% of the IPs assigned to us for the 500K requests had already been assigned to us. But for a second, wait, this is an impressive result considering they only have 2 million IPs as there are providers with larger pools but still performed poorly — Rayobyte, Geonode, Proxyrack, and Infatica. It is also important you know a 20% duplicate rate won’t get you blocked in most cases.
How to Use IPRoyal
The IPRoyal service makes it easy for you to use their service even if you are new to proxies. First, you are not being forced to purchase a plan to have access to their user dashboard. All you need is to register an account. On the dashboard, you will see the interface to add funds to your wallet.
It is from this wallet that you purchase proxies from and the service supports multiple payment methods including credit/debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
As with other providers, all you need to use them is the proxy address, port, username, and password and these can be gotten after you have purchased the residential proxies. From the dashboard, you can configure it to provide you only IPs from specific locations and even set the IP rotation time.
While I mentioned username and password as part of the proxy credentials, they are not compulsory, you can whitelist your device IPs and use the proxies on them without using username and password for authentication.
Customer Support
You might think you don’t need customer support — but there are times you will need it and when you pitch your tent with a service that does not invest in customer support, you will know how important that is. The IPRoyal service is one of those services that make it easy for its customers to access help.
First, it has a live chat support feature that provides you with real-time support. I made use of this. One thing about this is that if you are to wait, you are told what number you are in the queue which is good from a user experience perspective.
The live chat support is available during work hours only. If you need to speak to them outside of these periods, you will have to contact them via email or on their social media handle, and from experience, you won’t wait longer than 4 hours before getting a response from them.
Source of IPs
It is a known fact that residential proxy networks do not own the IPs they use — the IPs are sourced via P2P networks and this is why they are able to provide millions of IPs with extensive location coverage. However, some of them can do shady or even illegal stuff just to get these IPs including hacking computers and turning them into zombie computers. The IPRoyal service prides itself as one of the residential proxy networks that offer ethically sourced IPs.
It has a service known as the IPRoyal Pawns which provides an app users install on their devices in other to share their bandwidth and IP and get financial compensation as a reward. Of course, the amount paid is small and will only make sense if one has access to unlimited Internet — anything outside of that and you will run into loss.
Do We Recommend IPRoyal
The IPRoyal service is one provider I can’t help but recommend it especially for small-scale web scraping projects. This is because of its traffic never-expire support, good success rate, fast enough response time, and undetectable proxies. However, it might not be the best for geo-targeted tasks except if the location is the US or a few of the other top-supported locations.
Alternatives to IPRoyal
While the IPRoyal service is good, it is not the best for all use cases and there are instances where you will need an alternative. Below are some of the alternatives to IPRoyal.
Recommended alternative to IPRoyal. The pay-as-you-go pricing for their proxies is almost the same as that of IPRoyal. However, it has a large pool, better session,s and offers more unique IPs in terms of IP rotation. It is also one of the fastest and has a larger pool with more extensive location support. This service also provides a proxy list generation tool which is a good addition you don’t get with IPRoyal.
Recommended for is large proxy pool. Bright Data has over 72 million IP addresses in its pool, enough to scrape at any scale you want. It has one of the best location support, allowing you to choose IPs from specific states and cities around the world. It is a provider meant for enterprise customers but also affordable enough for small proxy users to use.
Recommended for its cost efficiency. The Proxy-cheap service is cheaper than IPRoyal as its pricing starts from $5 per GB with a discount for more bandwidth. Even at it cheaper price, you will get more value than the proxies from IPRoyal. It also has a fairly larger pool and performs a little better too.
Recommended for its clean proxy pool. Soax just like IPRoyal ethically sources its IPs. However, what sets it apart is how it monitors its pool regularly in other remove bad IPs. This improves the success rate and reduces connection errors and retries. Unfortunately, it can be regarded as an expensive provider, especially for small proxy users.
