Are you looking for a review of Proxy-Cheap residential proxies? Come in now and read our expert review. Delve into the specifics of Proxy-Cheap's offerings and equip yourself with the knowledge to make an informed purchase decision today.
If you have been an avid reader of this blog, you will have come across some of our proxy recommendation articles that we mentioned Proxy-Cheap. We have also reviewed them in the past.
However, the proxy market is fast growing and so, what is fact a year ago would have become obsolete due to the fast pace at which the market and its players are moving. I have decided to give a review of Proxy-Cheap again and this time, I will be giving a comprehensive review, ranging from their proxy types, the features of their residential and performance expectations, customer support, how to use it, verdict, and alternative providers.
An Overview of Proxy-Cheap
The Proxy-Cheap service is a proxy provider with a focus on those looking for cheap proxies and you can tell that from the name. These set of customers are also in most cases, small proxy users and as such, the service has built its infrastructure in such a way that it meets the needs of these proxy users.
It offers some of the cheapest proxies in the market that are effective enough for us. Even though it is affordable, the quality of proxies you get here is superb and the performance is also great. However, it also does have its cons which will be discussed further in the review.
| Parameter | Feature |
| IP Type | Residential/ISP/Mobile/Datacenter |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | $4.99/GB (Pay-as-you-go) |
| Pool Of IPs | 6.9+ Million |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP and SOCKS5 |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Countries |
| Authentication | Username/Password |
| Speed | Good |
| Free Trial | No |
| Refund Policy | Yes |
| Support | Live Support, Contact Form, Social Media, and Email |
| Jurisdiction Location | Delaware （US） |
Proxy Types
The Proxy-Cheap service offers proxies in a good number of proxy categories ranging from residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies. Let’s take a look at the specific proxy types offered by this service.
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies were the first product offered by this provider. The name residential proxy is used but in reality, what is offered in this proxy type is specifically rotating residential proxies. The type of proxies that have millions of IPs in the pool (Proxy-Cheap has 6.9 million) but you are given just one proxy endpoint.
The endpoint gets assigned a new IP randomly from the pool after every request. What this does is that it makes it difficult for websites you access to tie down your multiple requests to a single device or IP address.
It is the kind of setup you need for web scraping as web scraping involves sending too many requests which could get you blocked when you exceed request limits. However, when this is used, you don’t get to reach the limit before you get a new IP thereby staying protected.
Aside from getting your IP changed after every request, there is support for sticky ports that will maintain IP and by extension, session for a limited period of time. If you need to manage multiple accounts, you can use this as its session support will help you stay logged in for a limited period.
These proxies allow you to choose IPs from 130 countries, which makes it great for scraping geo-targeted content. In terms of pricing, the Proxy-Cheap residential proxies are priced based on bandwidth and are considered one of the cheapest out there. You get charged $5 per GB for a start with no minimum monetary commitment. However, if you purchase GB, the price per GB becomes cheaper.
Static Residential Proxies
Unlike Proxy-Cheap’s rotating residential proxies described above, their static residential proxies do not change IPs for you — IPs remain static for as long as you pay for them. This is possible because again, unlike in the case of their rotating counterparts that their IPs are sourced via P2P, the IPs for this are obtained directly from Internet Service Providers (ISPs), giving them better control which allows them to offer them as static proxies.
One interesting thing about these proxies is that they are as fast as datacenter proxies while retaining the undetectable nature of residential proxies, providing you with the best of both worlds.
Proxy-Cheap static residential proxies offer you static residential proxies from 11 countries. For this, you enjoy unlimited bandwidth and there are over one million IPs in the pool for their customers’ usage.
The best use case for their static residential proxies is account management as they allow extended sessions. Interestingly, they are also a good fit for online streaming of content from Netflix, Hulu, and their alternatives. They are also perfect for gaming online.
The pricing for their static residential proxies is based on the number of IPs as opposed to bandwidth in their rotating residential proxies. You can purchase daily, weekly, and monthly proxies for at $0.99, $1.99, and $3.49 per proxy respectively. These prices make them competitive and affordable to those looking for quality proxies to use.
Mobile Proxies
In the past, Proxy-Cheap offers support for about 4 countries in their mobile proxy service. Now, only US IPs are supported. Mobile proxies are at the apex level of being undetectable. This is because of the trust and reputation they have earned as being the least spammed.
There is also the advantage of giving your requests a mobile footprint that earns you more trust. The mobile proxies here are dedicated mobile proxies — assigned only to you. If you purchase a plan, you are assigned a modem and sim card for the period and only your requests pass through them. Interestingly, there is support for IP rotation too.
Mobile proxies can be expensive and as such, you should only use them for tasks that residential proxies won’t help much. Currently, social media account management is the major use case of these proxies. Specifically, they should be used for Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. For their daily mobile proxies, pricing is $15. There is a weekly and monthly plans available at $30 and $50 respectively.
Datacenter Proxies
Proxy-Cheap also offers datacenter proxies, specifically the dedicated proxies that are assigned to only you and the IP remains static. The datacenter proxies it offers have low spam scores, making them usable even on some popular websites.
However, that is not what they were built for. If you have a web target you want to access either to unblock or access geo-targeted content and the site does not have a strict anti-spam system, you can use them. One of their advantage is speed and currently, they are the fastest out there. However, they easily get detected and banned by popular sites and that is why they are recommended for unpopular sites with weak anti-spam systems.
The datacenter proxies come in two different versions — the popular IPv4 datacenter proxies which are the de facto datacenter proxies and their IPv6 counterparts. According to Proxy-Cheap, they have over 900K IPs each. The location support is good for a datacenter proxy as it supports over 12 countries.
In terms of pricing, the pricing is cheap as a proxy is sold for $1.99 per month. There is a daily and weekly plan available too. For their IPv6 proxies, the pricing is even cheaper per proxy but you will have to buy a package with more IPs. The smallest plan comes with 50 IPs and is sold for $20 per month.
Residential Proxy Features
In this section of the Proxy-Cheap review, we will take a look at some of the major features of their residential proxies.
Cheap and Flexible Pricing
The Proxy-Cheap service has been set up to specifically meet the proxy needs of small proxy users looking for cheap proxies. And for this, it perfectly meets them. It has one of the cheapest prices out there. For their residential proxies, the cost per GB is $5 — some sort of pay-as-you-go model. However, that is just half of the equation, if you are a heavy user, you can get a real discount and get the price per GB to $3.
The pay-as-you-go model allowing you to purchase proxies without a minimum monetary commitment makes it flexible and affordable while also rewarding heavy users. For their other proxies such as static residential proxies and mobile proxies, there is even support for both daily and weekly proxies. However, except you are sure you don’t need proxies for a month, going for any of these is you wasting your money.
Rotation and Sticky Session Support
Their residential proxies are rotating proxies and by default, will switch your IP after every request. This is beneficial for web scraping and tasks that need as many new IPs as possible. While the IPs get switched for you, based on our test, you won’t be getting 100% unique IPs — more on this in the performance section. This IP rotation that happens after every request is what makes it a high-rotating proxy.
However, it is not all the time you want your IP to change such as in situations where you need to maintain a session for a period of time. For this, you can use their sticky session port which will maintain IP for you for a period of time up to 30 minutes before changing.
The session period otherwise known as rotation time is customisation and you can set it to change between 5 minutes and 30 minutes. One other feature you will like is its ability to return a proxy list via API, which you can create to create as many concurrent sessions as you want.
Sizable IP Pool and Good Location Coverage
The Proxy-Cheap service does have over 6.9 million IPs in its pool. And I tell you what; that is sizeable enough for most of your web scraping needs especially if you are a small to mid-scale web scraper.
As you will come to find out later in the review under the performance section, over 500K requests were sent and about 84% of the IPs assigned were unique IPs which is one of the highest numbers on the list of proxy providers we watch. Interestingly, aside from getting things right from the aspect of an IP pool size, it also got things right from the location support.
The service has IPs from over 130 countries across the globe — and the supported countries are the most sought-after countries. However, there is a caveat here — using the geo-targeting feature will shrink the size of the pool available to you and if there are not many IPs enough for the region you choose, it will make IP rotation inefficient enough to get you blocked.
Residential Proxy Performance
In this section of the review, I will present to you, some of our findings while testing out the proxies. While the review is focused on Proxy-Cheap, there are instances where I will provide charts with other providers to help you with some level of comparison.
Proxy IP Geo Test
Location support for most residential proxies is seen as something they can use as bragging rights. And to be honest, it is and even more. The locations a provider supports determine the geo-locations you can use to collect geo-targeted data.
According to the information on the Proxy-Cheap website, it has support for over 130 countries. But wait a minute, this is nothing but half-baked information. Unlike other providers that tell you the number of IPs they have in their top supported countries, Proxy-Cheap does not. Look at the screenshot below showing their location support.
As you can see above, there are only 8 countries the service is proud to show you. And even for these countries, there is still no detail on the size of the pool from them. If you click on each of them, you just get a long-written piece trying to sell the proxies to you but not mentioning how many IPs they have from there.
However, from the whole performance test, we find out they do have a large pool and most of their IPs are from the countries above. For this reason, I will say if the country you need IPs for is not one of the above 8 countries, you are better off going for a different provider — check the alternative section of this article for alternative providers.
Proxy Success Rate Test
As stated earlier, the Proxy-Cheap service has its eyes on providing affordable proxies to customers. But how does that translate to meeting the customers' goals rather than just being affordable to them? One of the ways we measure performance, especially for web scraping is the proxy success rate.
Using this test, one is able to tell how many percent of the web requests he sends will be successful and how many will fail. While all of the failures can’t be attributed to the proxy you use, if you get things right from the other aspect, it can give you an idea of the percentage of the proxy failure. Below is the result of the success rate carried out.
To give some context, 300 concurrent requests were sent multiple times to the websites mentioned in the chart above. As you can see, the site list was drawn from e-commerce, social media, and search engines. Th average success rate for all of 90.5%. This is a deviation from the 99.9% success rate promised. However, this is not something bad as a 90% success rate is one of the best you will get in the industry as the average is around 80%.
It might interest you to know that if you test with fewer concurrent requests, you will get a better result than this. The test shows you can use their proxies on the popular sites on the Internet, thereby confirming their undetectable status.
Response Time Test
How long will you have to wait after sending a web request to get a response? That’s what the response time seeks to measure. Residential proxies have been fingered to be bottlenecks in applications they power as they are slow. However, this does not mean you should settle for anyone you see as there are some residential proxies that have shown to be fast enough to scrape data at the scale you want faster.
If you settle the slow ones, then you need to multiply the time it takes to scrape a page times the total number of pages that need to be scraped — that’s your waiting time. I tested the response of not just Proxy-Cheap but that of other providers to show you how it stands in comparison to its competitors.
As you can see above, the average response time of Proxy-Cheap is 0.93 seconds — less than a second. This is one of the fastest in the market as you can see. While there are faster providers like Bright Data at 0.48 seconds, and a host of a few others like Nimble, Smartproxy, Soax, and Oxylabs, there are equally slower providers.
In fact, the slowest in the chart above is 3.72 seconds. From the above, you can tell that the Proxy-Cheap service is one of the fastest residential proxies out there when compared with the average response time in the industry.
Unique IP Test
The unique IP test is the last test we carried out. Here, we seek to find out how many of the IPs assigned to us will be unique in the case of IP rotation while web scraping. The percentage for this will reveal to us whether we can quickly get to an edge case when web scraping especially for big projects.
To test this, we sent 500K web requests to a random web target and measured the unique IP rate. We didn’t measure just for Proxy-Cheap, we measured it together with other providers so we could compare. Below is the result gotten for this.
The IP duplicate rate for Proxy-Cheap is 15.41%. That is, over 84% of the 500K requests were assigned a new IP. At first, this might look like it is not impressive to the newbie. However, this is one of the best results so far — and considering it is a small proxy, it is even impressive. A 15% IP duplicate rate won’t get you near getting blocked except if there is something else that is wrong with your setup.
However, you need to know that this is only true if you don’t use the geo-targeting option. With the geo-targeting option enabled, you have access to fewer IPs to work with and as such, the duplicate rate can be higher, especially for locations with fewer IPs.
How to Use Proxy-Cheap
If you are looking for an easy-to-use proxy service, then the Proxy-Cheap service is here. Suppose you have used other proxy services, there is a high chance you don’t even need any guide to make use of their proxies. All you need to do is create an account, purchase, a plan, and get your proxy credentials.
The proxy host and port are the same regardless of the settings you choose. This is because residential proxies use a shared pool and the host and port given to you are for accessing the pool — the actual IP address assigned to your request differs and changes after every request.
For your session management task, you can use their session management and the default rotation time is 30 — no customization option. While the Proxy-Cheap service is easy to use, it is easy to use to a fault. The customization options are generally limited.
In terms of location support, you can only choose country-level geo-targeting — no state and city-level targeting. Also, you can’t generate multiple proxy endpoints as other advanced providers and even a small provider like Hydraproxy support. Comparing it with Hydraproxy, aside from the multiple endpoint generator, Proxy-Cheap is actually ahead in most other regards.
Customer Support
What is the kind of customer support you should expect from this provider? Even though it is cheap, it does have its eyes on offering good customer support. Proxy-Cheap does have support for a live chat feature through which you get real-time support. And for the period they have their team members available, you will get a swift and helpful response. However, their live chat support feature is not always available.
The live chat feature is only available Monday-Friday 15:00-23:00 EEST excluding holidays. For these periods, you can contact their customer support via email. For this, you will have to wait a while as depending on the timing and other factors, it could take up to 24 hours before you will get a response.
However, when I tested their email support, I got back a response (the one in the screenshot above) in less than 3 hours. So, I can say they have got a responsive email support, faster than the actual timeline they provide on their website.
Source of IP Addresses
The Proxy-Cheap service has over 6.9 million IPs in its pool. But interestingly, it does not own any of these IPs and doesn’t have full control over them. It routes requests via the ones available at any given time. The IPs are sourced via a P2P network — and this is not only unique to Proxy-Cheap but all other providers.
This method of sourcing for IP addresses can be ethical or not depending on whether the users whose devices join the P2P network are aware of what it is meant for and give their consent.
The Proxy-Cheap service does not provide details on the source of its IP addresses and as such, we can’t say the specific apps it uses to get the IPs. Subsequently, we can’t ascertain whether their IPs are sourced ethically or not based on the publicly available information on their site.
Do We Recommend Proxy-Cheap
The Proxy-Cheap service is perfectly positioned to take on your small web scraping projects. It does not have some of the nice-to-have features like state and city-level targeting and neither does it give you full control over your session. However, for the basic features you will need for a small-scale web scraping project, it will get it done.
It is also one of the fastest out there and can help you get your tasks done fast. The pricing for their proxies is also a good advantage. However, I wouldn’t recommend this for large scraping projects.
Alternatives to Proxy-Cheap
Proxy-Cheap does have its pros but there are areas it is not great. For these areas, you can take a look at one of the alternatives described briefly below.
Smartproxy — Recommended for its affordable but premium features.
This provider does have one of the largest pools with over 55 million IPs. It allows you to create as many proxy endpoints as you want, gives you support for state-level geo-targeting, and offers you better performance in all aspects. Interestingly, it is quite cheaper than other providers that operate at the premium level and as such, it is the best alternative to Smartproxy.
Bright Data — Recommended for better session control.
Proxy-Cheap support session control, but does not give you full control. If you are looking for a service that will provide you with better session control, allowing you to customize the rotation time between 1 minute to 1 hour, then Bright Data is the option. It is also a premium provider, offers the best performance in the market so far, has a large pool, and can be used for all kinds of automation including web scraping.
Soax — Recommended for granular geo-targeting.
If you read the ease of usage section, you will see that one of the cons of Proxy-Cheap is that it only supports country-level targeting. If you are looking for a service that supports state and city-level targeting for better and more precise location targeting, then Soax is the best option for you.
It also offers superior performance to Proxy-Cheap. However, the minimum monetary commitment is higher than in both Smartproxy and Bright Data even though Bright Data is better than it.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 9.2/10
9.2/10
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Proxy Network - 9.5/10
9.5/10
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Proxy Functions - 9.5/10
9.5/10
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Customer support - 9.4/10
9.4/10
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