Are you looking forward to learning more about Soax backconnect proxies before making a monetary commitment? This article will be used to provide an honest review of Soax backconnect proxies?
The market has been proliferated with many residential IP proxy network providers, with many offering the same features that choosing the best one becomes difficult for a novice in proxy usage.
One of the proxy providers in the market is Soax. Just like every other provider in the market, it has made lots of promises and wants intending users to believe it is one of the best residential proxy services in the market.But are they telling you the truth, or is it just marketing tactics? To find out whether their proxies are what they said they are, read this Soax review to the end to get a clearer picture of who they really are. Before moving into the review proper, let take a look at an overview of Soax.
Soax Overview
- Win 2022's Reliability Award with Clean Proxy Pool & ISP-Level GEO-targeting
Soax proxies are rotating proxies, and they have got proxies in most countries in the world and support a good number of targeting features that you will love. They are also secured and easy to use. However, their pricing on a general level can be said to be expensive even though they are quite flexible. Aside from this, they have got other downsides.
Parameter | Feature |
IP Type | Residential (Wifi + 4G) |
Price Charged | Bandwidth and port |
Price Sample |
|
Pool of IPs | 8+ Million |
Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) and Socks5 |
IP Rotation | Sticky Session (Time) |
Filtering/Targeting | Countries, cities, region, ISP |
Authentication | IP Authentication and username/password |
Speed | Good |
Trial Offer |
$1.99 for 100 MB |
Refund Policy | Yes |
Support | Live Support, Contact Form, Soaxbot (Telegram) |
Jurisdiction Location | The United Kingdom |
Soax Pros
Soax proxies are loved by many Internet marketers because of some of its features. This section will be used to discuss these strengths.
Excellent Location Coverage
When you are talking about providers that have got good location coverage, Soax has to be on the list – else; the list is not complete. Soax has got residential IPs in most countries around the world. If you check their website, you will see a map depicting the areas they have coverage.
While this map can be helpful, it can’t be compared with the one you will see when you log into your dashboard as you have the opportunity to even check some location-specific information. With Soax, I doubt if there is any location, you will need proxies that they do not have IPs from such locations.
The presence of IPs from different countries in the world makes geo-targeting any country of your choice possible. Not only do they have the country targeting option, but they also have the option to target specific regions, cities, and even Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
This makes it possible for you to access any geo-targeted content on the web. It makes it possible to also unblock regional restrictions. Soax targeting options and their location coverage is one of the best features that makes me like them.
Large Proxy Network
Another aspect where you will love Soax is in the number of IPs they have in their pool. Soax has a proxy pool with over 8 million residential IPs assigned by Internet Service Providers and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).
These IPs are trusted by websites and do not suffer much scrutiny and ban as other IPs suffer. Even if an IP assigned to your traffic gets banned, you do not need to worry as Soax rotating system will change the IP assigned to you. Considering the fact that they have good location coverage, you do not have anything to worry about.
With a large proxy pool, they have what it takes to take up your project, whether big or small. Interestingly, they take care of IP rotation even though the rotating system is not as excellent as other providers. At least, you can use it for most use cases ranging from account management, web scraping, and other forms of automation and botting.
Good Scraping Performance
Web scraping and crawling is the most popular use of proxies to Internet marketers as SEO monitoring, travel aggregation, price monitoring, advert verification, and most other automation use cases are all specialized web scraping. Because of this, we consider web scraping any time we are reviewing any proxy.
To make sure we provide an all-encompassing review, we had to pick websites from different industries ranging from social media, and e-commerce. The sites considered are some of the strictest and aggressive when it comes to fighting botting. We sent an average of 12,653 requests to each of the websites, and the result is displayed below.
Performance on 300 Concurrent connections | ||||
Test | Success Rate (%) | Error (%) | TimeOut (%) | Block (%) |
Amazon | 94 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
Adidas | 86 | 0 | 10 | 4 |
Booking | 98 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
Bing.com | 97 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
Craigslist | 90 | 2 | 5 | 3 |
91 | 91 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
Nike | 89 | 1 | 5 | 5 |
93 | 1 | 3 | 3 | |
89 | 1 | 3 | 7 | |
Youtube | 84 | 3 | 9 | 6 |
91.10 |
Looking at the table above, you will observe that the websites considered are very popular and some of the most difficult websites to scrape. The average success rate is 91.10, and this performance is good even though there are other providers such as Luminati with better performance, and much similar to smart proxy.
From the table, you will see that Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Craigslist seem to suspect and block some of the requests – and most of the blocks are Captchas related. With a good Captchas solver, the success rate will increase.
Acceptable Proxy Speed
Response Time
What do we think about the response speed of Soax backconnect proxies? Well, to reach a conclusion, we had to put their proxies into a response time test by sending requests to the websites considered in the scraping performance test and measure the response time gotten. The result we got wasn’t breaking any record and but it is acceptable for residential proxies.
Proxy Connection Speed
Another thing we tested about the speed is the connection speed, and we made use of the popular Speedtest tool for checking the ping time, download and upload speed. Below is the result of the test.
- Average Ping: 81ms
- Average Download: 23.16 Mbps
- Average Upload: 11.86 Mbps
Easy to Use
Soax presents one of the best dashboards among the popular proxy provider. The dashboard is easy to use and beautiful at that. From the dashboard, you can authorize your device IP address so that you do not need to worry about using username and password for authentication.
It makes use of copy buttons to make copying of any data from the proxy detail section easy. If you want to download the details, you can also do that in TXT format. Also important is the fact that Soax provides an API for developers to use. However, the API is available on request. Geo-targeting is made easy using the online dashboard.
Flexible Payment Options
The last on the list of pros of Soax is the flexibility of their payment option. The industry is known for selling only monthly proxies. This is the same with Soax, You can even choose if you want mobile proxies or Wi-Fi proxies. the screenshot above is the Soax price of their proxies.
Soax Cons
Soax seems to be a good residential proxy provider, no doubt. However, it has got some dark sides you have to be wary about. Some of these are discussed below.
Expensive Pricing
Soax has updated the pricing and trial, now offer a much reasonable price at monthly and muc clear proxies packages than before, It's the same as other regular proxy providers.
No doubt, I stated that they have got flexible payment options such as daily, weekly, and monthly which I stated that it is actually a plus. Aside from this, every other thing about their pricing is not friendly – at least to small marketers on a tight budget. Their packages are priced based on the number of locations, port, and bandwidth. Take, for instance, their smallest plan for a day costs $20.
This is just for a single location (let say the US) – the number of ports attached to this subscription is 300 and bandwidth is limited to 19GB. If you want to unlock all locations, this daily plan becomes $100. You will agree with me that this is quite expensive.
The flexibility can also make it easier to mistakenly subscribe to the wrong plan. Aside from this, one other thing I find about them that’s not so good is their free trial option. Unlike other providers, Soax provides a very limited free trial option – it is only for one hour. They have a refund policy in place, though.
Customer Support is Slow
Another aspect of Soax that I find not good is their customer support. When it comes to the channels you can use to reach them, they provide many. You can contact them via their live chat support, email address, Skype, and even support ticket.
However, before writing this article, I tried making use of their email support system and it took them days to reply to my email. To me, this is unacceptable from a proxy provider as this could mean halting your project for days. Just like every other provider, they also have an FAQ section. However, I was disappointed by the content as they do not cover many of the questions one expects them to cover.
Your Connection is Secured But you’re Being Monitored
There’s no doubt that your traffic is secured with Soax as they make use of end to end encryption to keep your traffic secured from eavesdroppers. However, you just have to know that you are being monitored. Soax makes use of a Know Your Customer (KYC) system to keep a tab on the identity of their customers. It is headquarters in The United Kingdom and subject to the law there.
The UK is part of the 5 eyes alliance. And you’re your data will be shared with the authorities when they request it. In fact, look at the screenshot above. It is a cut from their term of service page and it states that your data is being retained and can be shared with relevant authorities should they request for it. If you are very much concerned about the jurisdiction of a proxy provider, then you have to think before pitching your tent with Soax.
Do I Recommend Soax Proxies?
Looking at the pros section of the article, you can see that Soax is a provider you can get proxies that work for many use cases as it is rotating, have support for a good number of locations, comes with a large proxy pool, and compatible with many sites, among others. Because of this, I recommend them. However, you still have to consider its area of jurisdiction which is the UK, its expensive pricing, and slow email support.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 9.4/10
9.4/10
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Proxy Network - 9.8/10
9.8/10
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Proxy Functions - 9.9/10
9.9/10
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Customer support - 9.1/10
9.1/10
Read other user reviews
Soax alternatives
- Luminati.io (Now is brightdata): Largest residential IP pool, read our unbiased review of Brightdata here.
- Stormproxies: Budget Choice! Small pool with unlimited bandwidth! Read our unbiased review Here.
- Smartproxy: The Best price of alternative for Soax, read our unbiased review of smartproxy here.