Webshare Review

Are you unsure about using Webshare's residential proxies? My detailed review, based on personal testing, offers insights to help you assess their suitability for your needs. Discover the essential aspects and performance of these proxies to make a well-informed choice.

One of the proxy services I have wanted not to touch before suddenly having the need to touch it because of its new developmental efforts is Webshare. I first knew about the Webshare proxy service when it was offering free and cheap datacenter proxies and I never liked it then because of the obvious security and privacy concerns.

However, it had grown from that to a better provider, offering residential proxies and even a better datacenter proxy network. With this new development that has happened over the years, I have decided to take a look and give a comprehensive Webshare review most especially on their residential proxies.

Webshare Proxy Overview

An Overview of Webshare Proxy

The brand has been in the market for a while as a free proxy service provider before becoming serious and pivoting into offering residential proxies and better datacenter proxies. It is based in the US and has a focus on small proxy providers, especially for its rotating residential proxies and datacenter proxies.

One thing you will come to like about the service is that even though it is now a paid service provider, it still didn’t leave behind, all of its free traits as it offers free trial support that is easy to access. In this review, I will take on the proxy types, and the features you will get from their residential proxies and provide details of the performance as tested by us too.

Parameter Feature
IP Type Residential/ISP/Datacenter
Price Charged Bandwidth
Price Sample Start at 1GB – $7 (Monthly)
Pool of IPs 30M+ IPs
Proxy Protocol HTTP and SOCKS5
IP Rotation Each Session
Filtering/Targeting Countries
Authentication IP Authentication and Username/Password
Speed Average
Free Trial 10 proxies
Refund Policy 2 days
Support Email
Jurisdiction Location United States

Visit Webshare.io


Proxy Types

In this section of the review, I will give an overview of each of the types of proxies they offer and let you know what they are best used for and for whom they are meant for.

Rotating Residential Proxies

Known as just residential proxies on Webshare or most providers because they are the de facto residential proxies out there. For this, Webshare gives you a proxy endpoint in the form of a domain name and then a port. It is this proxy endpoint that gets assigned an IP dynamically and the IP gets changed frequently enough to avoid exceeding request limits that will get you blocked.

The service has over 30 million IP addresses in its pool sourced from over 195 countries across the globe. These proxies are best used for web scraping and automation tasks such as travel fare aggregation, e-commerce scraping, and SEO scraping.

Even though they have a large pool, I wouldn’t recommend this for large scraping projects as there have been complaints about this when used for large-scale projects. But the smaller to mid-scale projects, it is a good provider.

Rotating Residential Proxies for Webshare

In terms of pricing, Webshare is being clever by half. If you read the content on its page, you will it claim to offer the most affordable residential proxies at a price of $4.5 per GB. That’s just a marketing gimmick and the only users that get that would be those that purchase 3000GB which costs $13,500.

For the rest of us, we aren’t getting their proxies at that price. For the smallest plan which comes with 1GB, you will have to pay $7. If you go for their 10GB plan you will pay $60 ($6 per GB). Looking at their pricing, one can agree they are one of the cheapest though. However, there are cheaper providers that offer better performance than them — their pricing needs to be reviewed.

Static Residential Proxies

The static residential proxies are the second product they developed after their datacenter proxies. For this, you get a static residential proxy assigned to you for as long as you pay for it. The idea behind static residential proxies is a novel one. They are hosted on datacenter infrastructure, giving them the kind of speed performance you get from datacenter proxies.

However, their IPs are residential IPs, making them as undetectable as regular residential proxies. This gives you the best of both worlds of residential and datacenter proxies. However, it lacks the flexibility that comes with the IP rotation support of residential proxies but you enjoy unlimited bandwidth.

Static Residential Proxies for Webshare

Static residential proxies are long-term session management proxies and by virtue of their residential IP usage, you can use them on all websites. The yard is perfect for account management on both e-commerce and social media or even any other type of site. They are the de facto proxies for sneaker copping too.

Unlike in the case of their rotating residential proxies, the pricing isn’t competitive enough, the pricing for their static residential proxies is cheaper than what you get from other services. The smallest plan comes with 20 IPs and sells for $6. There are other plans supported.

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are their most popular products and their first product. For this, there are 3 types of proxies — shared, private, and dedicated proxies. The shared datacenter proxies are the worst of them all, you can buy a bunch of them for a few dollars but their performance is terrible and I wouldn’t recommend them.

Their private and dedicated proxies give you better performance compared to their shared proxies as only you get to use a proxy.

Datacenter Proxies for Webshare

However, the performance is still not as competitive as some of the other providers in the market. But looking at the price, that is a great compromise. For these dedicated proxies, you can purchase 20 proxies for $26.60 monthly. The more proxies you purchase, the cheaper the price per proxy becomes.

Their usage is mostly in the area of online gaming and content streaming. However, you need to make sure your target platform allows datacenter IPs as some websites block them by default.


Residential Proxy Features

The Webshare service’s residential proxies do have their own features which make it a good provider for some usage. In this section, I will discuss some of the key features of this service that you need to be aware of.

Cheap Pricing

The Webshare residential proxies are charged based on bandwidth consumption. Compared to the top providers, its pricing is affordable. For a second, forget the $4.5 per GB price written on their website as only users of their biggest plan that costs $13500 will get it at that price.

For most users, the cost per proxy is between $5 – $7. Even at this price, the cost is reasonable and can be said to be cheap. And at this price, you get a pool of over 30 million IPs from 195 countries.

While their pricing is cheap, there is still more that needs to be done. Webshare is basically a small proxy provider and as such, its pricing package should mirror that. If you take a look at its plans, you will see 1GB, 10GB, 25GB, and so on.

There are a lot of users that will need bandwidth in between these that are left out. Offering a pay-as-you-go plan will be a better option and even the top providers like Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy have already keyed into this.

Sizeable IP Pool with Good Location Coverage

Webshare has over 30 million IPs in its pool. This size of IP is quite larger than the average considering its customer base is small proxy users. With this, you should get more unique IPs than the average small provider in its class.

Interestingly, the size of the pool is not the only interesting thing here — the geo-location these IPs are gotten from is also diverse. The IPs are obtained from over 195 countries across the globe. And you are allowed to choose IPs from a specific country you want IPs from.

But do not be carried away by their geo-targeting support. It is not all countries that they have enough IPs for you to effectively scrape data on a reasonable scale as IP rotation is usually not efficient with a small pool of IPs. As you will come to find out, over 80% – 90% of their IPs are from a handful of countries; the other countries have really small pools — small enough to be inefficient for IP rotation.

New IP per Request

The residential proxies here are backconnect proxies that change the IP assigned to you after every request. This assertion is theoretical as you will come to find out later in the performance section, even the best provider still assigns you an already assigned IP. But the unique IP rate gotten for Webshare is reasonably OK.

While there are over 30 million IPs in their pool, you are given just one proxy endpoint and this is in the form of a website domain/subdomain. It is this endpoint that their system dynamically assigns IPs to.

This takes away some of the proxy management tasks that you would have done if you were to be given a bunch of proxies to rotate manually. This auto-rotation capability of Webshare is the reason you are able to avoid blocks as you don’t maintain the same IP long enough to exceed request limits set by the website that exceeding them will lead to a block.

Advanced Features will Cost You

This is one aspect of Webshare I do not like. You are charged extra for some of the additional features on their website. Some of these include high concurrency, high priority, and IP authorization. Generally, there is an average number of concurrency allowed which is 500 by default.

If you need to create more concurrent threads, you will have to pay for it. If you also want a high priority in their network which will give you better performance than other users, you will also have to pay for it.

Same thing with if you need to authorize more than one IP address. Generally, the additional fee is uncalled for. Most of the residential proxies offer their proxies with unlimited concurrency — no publicly advertised package for prioritizing users, and the number of IP authorizations is the same for all users and free of charge too. While this might be a way to make more money for them, it is a lame way of doing it.

This is because users that need these features can get them for free from providers at the same price level as Webshare and their performance can even be said to be more competitive than what is obtainable from Webshare.


Residential Proxy Performance

In this section of the review, the focus will be on the performance you should expect from Webshare. We have tested their residential proxies and below is the performance we got from them.

Proxy IP Geo Test

The Webshare residential proxy network claims to support over 195 countries. While this is a good thing, the main question here is what is the distribution of the IPs and what are the top supported countries?

This is because for most, their top countries can account for as high as 80% of their pool and as such, while a country is captured in their pool, it can have fewer IPs that IP rotation won’t even make sense. For Webshare, below is the distribution of its IP across the top countries in its pool.

Proxy IP Geo Test of Webshare

As you can see above, over 34 percent of its IPs are from the United States, which is about 10 million IPs from the 30 million total. This means they have got enough US IPs for your web scraping and automation tasks. However, it also means that you might find it difficult to get IPs for the other 194 countries.

Proxy Location of Webshare

There are some other countries with sizeable pools such as France (2.1 million), Germany (2 million), United Kingdom (1.9 million), China (1.6 million), Canada (1.2 million), Japan (800K), and Australia (600K). Aside from the US, these are the other top countries with sizeable IPs.

The other countries in most cases will have really few IPs less than 50K with some even having less than 5K IPs. For the countries with fewer IPs, Webshare won’t provide you with enough IPs for your geo-location tasks for them.

Proxy Success Rate Test

The proxy success rate test reveals the percentage of your requests that will succeed or fail. This is an important test because not all requests you send via proxies for web scraping or other forms of automation will pass — some will fail and for these, your proxy will be the cause for some here.

However, you will need to keep this as low as possible. The Webshare service is a new player in the residential proxy market and for this reason, I didn’t expect much from it regarding success rate. However, the result I got was impressive compared to even some more expensive providers. The average success rate for Webshare is 87.7% at 300 concurrency.

Proxy Success Rate Test of Webshare

As you can see above, the success can go as high as 92% for the booking.com website. Other countries where it performs best include Instagram, Bing, Nike, Amazon, Adidas, and Craiglist. With this, we can say Webshare is good for e-commerce scraping. It also does well for social media too.

The worst performance, however, was on Google Search and YouTube at 83% each. While this means about 17% failure rate for these two sites, it is still not a bad value and can be said to be acceptable.

Response Time Test

Another test we carried out was the response time test. This tells you how fast or slow you get back a response when you send a web request via a proxy server. If you are conversant with proxies, you will know they are a bottleneck in this case, especially residential proxies.

But how well do Webshare proxies stand in this regard? Are they fast or they will waste your time? We didn’t only test the response time of Webshare, we tested that of top providers on our watchlist and then provided the data alongside the response time of Webshare. Below is the result generated in a chart.

Response Time Test of Webshare

The average response time you should expect from Webshare from our test is 1.17 seconds. At first, this does not look competitive as the likes of Bright Data, Nimbleway, Smartproxy, Soax, Oxylabs, and Proxy-cheap have a response time less than less than one second.

But these are the fastest in the market and Webshare speed can be said to be a better one compared to the average in the market. As you can above, some of the providers have a response time of between 2 seconds to above 3 seconds. Generally, I will say Webshare speed is not bad but acceptable and can be used for tasks that are not time-critical.

Unique IP Test

When web scraping, residential proxies are favored because of their capability to automatically rotate IPs for you which helps you exceed request limits without getting blocked. However, not all residential proxies have the same capability when it comes to IP rotation due to their differences in pool size and number of users using the network at a time.

Currently, no provider will provide you with 100% unique IPs. In all, you will want to pitch your tent with a service that can provide you with as many unique IPs as possible. Where does Webshare stand in this regard? We tested it by sending over 500K web requests without using any geo-targeting option. Below is the result of the test.

IP Duplication Rate by Proxy Providers

The duplicate IP rate of Webshaee is 19.47%. This means for every 100 IPs assigned to you, 19.47 have already been assigned to you in the past. Regardless, this is not a poor performance as 19.47% won’t get you blocked since the reassignment is random and as such, you won’t exceed the request limit.

If your task is even a small one since we recommend this only to small proxy users, the unique IP rate you will get will even be higher as here, we sent 500K requests and so, this is understandable.


How to Use Webshare

The Webshare service operates like your regular proxy provider and as such, if you have used a proxy before, you already know how to use it. Just register an account, purchase a plan, log into the user dashboard, and get the proxy details which include the proxy address, port, username, and password for authentication.

If you want to use the geo-targeting option so you can get IPs from specific countries, you can use the country code — for example, the US for the United States.

Usage of Webshare

There are situations where you don’t want to use the proxy address as provided as a subdomain but instead as a list of proxies, just click on the convert icon and you will get the proxy list instead.

Webshare supports IP authentication and using it, there is no need to provide a username and password for authentication — you just have to authorize your IP address. By default, you are allowed to authorize one IP address.

However, if you need to authorize more, you will have to pay to do that and that will cost you $5 per month. There is also support for high concurrency of more than 500 and also high priority which you will have to pay for too.


Customer Support

How will Webshare treat you if you have the need for clarification, complaints, or issues to solve? Well, most providers including the Webshare service will want you to believe they will treat you nicely but the experience differs by providers. For Webshare, getting customer support is a pain in the head if you are not a registered user.

This is because there is no Contact Us page but a help center where the number of articles there is too few to be comprehensive. In fact, their help documents are not helpful enough to newbies.

The only users that have access to customer support are registered users and even at that, the support is only via email — there is no live chat feature. For me, I had to wait for 7 hours to get a response which I would say is not fast enough. However, when they responded, the support was knowledgeable and got my issues solved.


Source of IPs

Webshare as with other residential proxies does not own the IPs it route requests through. They are sourced via P2P but the question is; what is the source? The answer can make a provider either an ethical provider that sources IPs via ethical means or one that engages in unethical practices to get IPs.

Webshare to the best of our knowledge is one of the services that get it IPs via ethical means. It has apps and uses the apps of some of its partners through which users can share their device IP and bandwidth and earn financial compensation for that.

The amount the app users earn is small and only makes sense if they have access to an unlimited data plan. Aside from the financial compensation, they are aware of what they got themselves into and it is with their consent.


Do We Recommend Webshare

Webshare is still new in the residential proxy market. And let's face it, it is like every other provider that has both its pros and cons. However, it has proven to function more when faced with small scraping and automation tasks. It is a great budget option for small proxy users and not suitable for accessing sites that have a strong anti-spam system to detect and block proxies.


Alternatives to Webshare

From the above, you can already tell there are instances where Webshare does not just cut it. If you find Webshare not good for you because of key requirements you need that they lack, you can choose from one of the alternatives below.

Proxy-Cheap 

Proxy-Cheap Overview

Best alternative to Webshare for a budget-friendly option. This provider supports both high-rotating and sticky proxies. It even gives you better control over your sessions, and offers you a faster performance in terms of success rate, response time, and unique IPs compared to Webshare even though its pool is small. It is also a cheaper option and even those that need just 1GB can get it at $5.

Bright Data 

Bright Data Overview

Recommended for better session control and stellar performance. If what you are looking for is a performance beast, then Bright Data is the option. It is an enterprise-level provider but small proxy users can still use it because of its support for the pay-as-you-go payment model.

It is the fastest, provides the most unique IPs in terms of IP rotation, and has the highest success rate in the market. Bright Data also gives you the most control over your session, making it more versatile than Webshare.

Soax 

Soax Overview

Recommended for its larger IP pool and granular geo-targeting support. Saox has over 100 million IPs in its pool and which is enough for your task on any scale. It also has one of the best location support and even allows you to choose not only the country you need IPs from but also the state and city. However, it is an enterprise-level service and its pricing is expensive.

Smartproxy 

Smartproxy Overview

Recommended for its faster speed and better success rate. Smartproxy is a premium residential proxy network. Surprisingly, its pricing is almost the same as that of Webshare even with its better performance in terms of faster response time, download speed, and even success rate. However, as with the other alternatives mentioned above, you will need to do KYC.


Our Expert's Review
  • Scaping Performance - 9.2/10
    9.2/10
  • Proxy Network - 9/10
    9/10
  • Proxy Functions - 9.1/10
    9.1/10
  • Customer support - 8.7/10
    8.7/10
9/10

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