Blazing Proxies Review

Do you need cheaper datacenter proxies for your scraping tasks? In today’s review of BlazingSEO, you’ll be able to check out our test and determine if it’s the right proxy provider for you.

Recommended for: Web Crawling, Social Media & scraping

Overeview

People that are in the proxy business are already familiar with Blazing Proxies. During the 8 years of existence, the number of employees, servers, and IP addresses grew, reaching the numbers we have today. Around 40 employees back the company, and even though it’s not breaking any records regarding the number of proxies or servers, it is one of the cheaper options.

The main question here is: does the lower price mean that you’ll be sacrificing performance? We’ll test that in this article.

Blazing Proxies is a provider that is positioned in the best part of the market. It offers datacenter proxies with a decent set of features for a competitive price. In recent months, the company introduced residential proxies, which are still in the beta stage. As soon as they release them officially, I’ll test them and see how they perform.

Back to the datacenter proxies, Blazing has some decent offerings. With over 300 thousand proxies across 22 countries and 9 ASNs, it’s not falling behind its competitors and even surpasses some. On the diversity side of things, the datacenters are located across multiple continents, including Africa. Combining this with the unlimited bandwidth, you can clearly see why Blazing Proxies managed to become the provider it is today.

Proxy Types, Features, and Pricing

Blazing Proxies has some serious claims about the use cases for its proxies. While in most cases that is true, when it comes to social media, datacenter proxies are not the best option, but I’ll test that to see how it goes. The main feature, something you’ll find in other datacenter proxy providers, is that you get no limit on the bandwidth and connections.

Blazing’s selling point is the price, and considering what you get, it is worth it. There are 3 types of proxies available: dedicated, semi-dedicated, and rotating. All of them are divided into 4 pricing plans starting from 5 to 99 proxies, going all the way to 1 thousand to 4999 IP addresses. The 4th package is the enterprise one, where you have the option to get as many proxies as you need, or at least as many as Blazing can provide.

The dedicated proxies are only yours as long as you pay for your subscription. Up to 3 users can use the semi-dedicated ones. Finally, the rotating ones pass through multiple ports, and the destination will see the multiple connections as different IP addresses.

As for the features, things are average, nothing that really stands out from the crowd. All packages come with unlimited bandwidth or connections, and the proxies get rotated each month. On top of that, you can also request for individual IP addresses to be replaced. In terms of the proxies, they are HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS compatible, and you also get IPv4 and IPv6 IP addresses. Finally, for authorization, you have the flexibility to authorize your sessions either by IP address or with username and password.

Unlike some of its competitors, Blazing Proxies offers a 2-day free trial with 5 proxies. It is an excellent option to test them before making a purchase.

Location of Proxy Servers

Blazing Proxies has a decent pool of proxies, consisting of over 300 thousand IP addresses in 22 countries. At the moment, the list of countries is:

• The US
• The UK
• India
• Germany
• Brazil
• Canada
• Australia
• Vietnam
• Japan
• France
• Spain
• Italy
• Poland
• Seychelles
• South Africa
• Mexico
• South Korea
• Philippines
• Indonesia
• Pakistan
• Argentina
• Colombia
• The Netherlands

Blazing Proxy offers an option to request additional locations if the ones you need are not on their list. Even though it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get the requested proxies in a day or two, it’s good to know that sometime in the future, the company will be offering them.

Ping and Speed Test

Since Blazing Proxy is a provider that is most suited for data scraping, it is imperative that it can provide high speeds and low latencies. All datacenters are connected withgigabit connections, meaning that it shouldn’t be a problem.

In this line of business, it’s not uncommon to encounter one advertisement, but the real-world results are quite different. To verify if Blazing Proxy’s speeds are at least close to the advertised ones, I ran a few tests.

Before I get into the results, there are two things to keep in mind. Datacenter proxies will almost always perform better than residential ones. Second, you should expect the speeds to vary due to multiple factors.

With that out of the way and looking at the results, I must say that I’m fairly impressed. These are far from the best performing proxies I’ve ever used but will definitely be more than enough for any scraping endeavor. There were a few with 100+ ms latency which should be pointed out. As for the speeds, only the last IP address performed significantly worse than the others.

Overall, I like the results and believe these are isolated IPs that don’t perform on par with the others.

GEOlocation Test / ISP Test

We ordered only USA proxies from Proxy-Seller and put all the proxies into the geolocation test by iplocation.net, a geolocation aggregator site to find the geolocation of an IP. We perform this test to find out whether the provider really delivers proxies as requested.

We are satisfied with the result as all the proxies are from the USA. We also noticed that the proxies are from different cities as well as from different subnets with no sequential IPs. This is a very good move, and we really appreciate this.

When looking at the results, things are kind of a mixed bag with some good and some bad news. On the positive side, all the proxies I’ve tested are from the US, and the results show that. When it came to the details, I ran two checks on each IP address and got slightly different results regarding the location and the ISP on some of the proxies. Not the best result, but overall shouldn’t be a problem in most situations.

IP address compatibility Test

Blazing Proxies claim that their IP addresses can be used for social media and SEO. My opinion on that advertisement is that datacenter proxies are generally not the best approach for these applications. Despite that, I did an IP compatibility test with some of the stricter websites to see which proxies can access them, and the results were very positive.

All proxies were able to access the list of sites used for this test. Only one of them didn’t manage to load Craigslist. Blazing Proxies had some problems in the past with these kinds of websites, but it seems that they managed to improve a lot.

Features of Blazing Proxies

Unlimited bandwidth

This is not something unique in the world of datacenter proxy providers, but it’s worth mentioning. All packages from Blazing Proxies come with unlimited bandwidth or connections. Excellent if you need to scrape larger amounts of data.

Dual authentication

To use the proxies, you’ll need to authenticate yourself to the system. The good news is the Blazing Proxies offers two types of proxy authentication: IP and username and password. The advantage of this is that you have the flexibility and go with the one that suits you the best.

Free trial

No one wants to buy something untested, especially something like proxies, regardless of how cheap they are. To help you decide, Blazing Proxies offers a free trial with IP addresses. While it’s not the longest trial period, 48 hours seems like more than enough to check if the proxies will work for you.

Free replacements

Like most datacenter proxy providers on the market, Blazing Proxies will rotate your proxies each month with non-consecutive ones. On top of that, you can request individual replacements for proxies that no longer work or you feel that they are not performing as they should.

Residential proxies

You won’t see too many datacenter proxy providers that offer residential IPs, but Blazing Proxies started to. That system is still in beta, so things may not work as advertised.

Easy to use

Even in the past, the one thing I liked about Blazing Proxies is the dashboard. First-time users may find it a bit busy with too much information, but things will start to make sense after a few minutes.

You have everything you’ll need in the dashboard’s main panel, with only a handful of settings located somewhere else.

How to authenticate

Blazing Proxies offers two ways of authentication, by IP address and username and password. This is an excellent way to avoid any restrictions if you have a dynamic IP address or use the proxies in multiple locations.

The authentication settings are located on the dashboard and are very easy to change. There are two options to choose your preferred authentication method. As soon as you select the one, you will need to wait about 30 minutes before the system acknowledges your authentication method.

For IP authorization, there are a few more steps. The first one is to select if you need HTTP or SOCKS proxies which will determine the protocols used by the service. The second step is to enter the IP address in the field below and click on “Add IP.” Similar to the username and password authentication, you’ll need to wait for around 30 minutes once you make some changes.

Our Editor’s Verdict

Blazing Proxies is one of those providers that grew steadily over the years. As the company increased its number of employees, it also improved its services, offering more for their customers. During my time with the proxies, I was generally satisfied and had almost no issues.

Our Verdict

I have nothing but positive words for Blazing Proxies. Even though I have used its services before, I was surprised by how much things have improved quickly.

There are plenty of proxies available in plenty of locations worldwide, combined with unlimited bandwidth and a dual authentication method. Even though the speeds and latencies were not the best of the best, you are getting plenty for it considering the price. The biggest downside is that I would’ve like to see phone support.

Overall, Blazing Proxies is an excellent provider if you need IP addresses for scraping or social media. Best of all is that you can test their proxies before purchasing to make sure they work per your requirements.

User’s Reviews & Rating