Oxylabs.io Datacenter Proxies Review

Recommended for: Social Media, SEO scraping, Streaming, price comparison

As online activities are growing, the demand for high-quality proxies is increasing as well. Proxies are used by businesses to conduct marketing campaigns, study products and service features and pricing by competitor companies, analyze market status, scrape SEO data and numerous other reasons.

Even solo ventures can flourish with the use of proxies. To accommodate this huge need of proxies, many proxy providers are emerging. One such proxy provider is Oxylabs.io, which has also seen tremendous growth in recent years.

To help you choose from a number of popular proxy services and their myriads of packages, we have reviewed some popular proxy services currently in operation. On this installment of our private proxy review series, we reviewed the private datacenter proxies offered by Oxylabs.io.

To have an unbiased review and judge properly, we purchased 10 proxies from Oxylabs.io and used them for a period of a week.

We performed a series of four tests on the proxies and have laid out the facts for you to decide. In the following table, you can see a side by comparison of their best and worst aspects that caught our eyes.

Proxy Types and Pricing

Oxylabs.io is popularly known for its top of the class residential proxies. But they also provide datacenter proxies. Apart from proxy service, Oxylabs.io offers real-time crawlers for all kinds of scraping needs.

• Compare the different type of web scraping tools

This is particularly helpful to do the scraping job on the backend and not go through the tiring process of buying and setting up proxies. But in this review, we will limit our description to the proxy service only.

Locations of proxy servers

Oxylabs.io is undoubtedly one of the largest proxy providers with their total proxy count reaching upwards of thirty million. So, it is of no doubt that they also have a wide variety of locations.

In fact, Oxylabs.io claims that they have proxies from all countries in the world. While this is a common feature offered by many residential proxies, it is quite impressive for datacenter proxies

You can find an interactive map on the Oxylabs.io website where you can hover your mouse cursor on any of the countries in the world to find out the number of proxies available in that country.

For example, Oxylabs.io has 3.5M+ datacenter and residential proxies in the USA alone. Most datacenter proxy providers do not even have that number of proxies in total.

Oxylabs.io has over 1.5 million proxies distributed in over 80 datacenters. Particulars for these data centers were not found on their website, but they ensure a 99% uptime for their proxies along with unlimited bandwidth.

Ping Test & Proxy Speed Test

As this review series focuses not only on the service but also tries to determine the actual performance of the products, we purchase proxies from each service that is reviewed.

Similarly, we purchased 10 private datacenter proxies from Oxylabs.io to find out how well they stand up in our tests. Read on to learn more about the tests and the results.

Speed Test:

Our first test to check proxy performance is to test the bandwidth speed of the proxies. Since proxies work by redirecting traffic through another server, it is often the case that the speed is reduced in the process. While fast connections are always desirable, there are some applications of proxies that don’t necessarily require fast speed. Determining the speed of a proxy service helps us recommend proxies based on applications.

The speed test was performed using fast.com, a service by Netflix that determines the internet connection speed by connecting to Netflix servers.

Our usual tool for determining connection speed is speedtest.net, but unfortunately, the website is not accessible through the Oxylabs.io proxies. We performed our tests on an internet connection with 560 Mbps download speed, and 280 Mbps upload speed.

All the proxies had a download speed greater than 50 Mbps which is enough for all sorts of proxy activities including streaming HD content. On average, most of the proxies had a download speed of around 300 Mbps and upload speed around 160 Mbps.

Ping Test:

Ping is the duration it takes for a data packet request to go from one server to another and then back again. This signifies the connection establishment time for the server.

Ping is one of the most important parameters while checking any internet connection since this defines how responsive the server is, without considering the connection speed.

To simulate accessing the proxy server from various locations, we use an online ping tester tool, whoer.net to ping the proxy server from three different locations.

For any server to perform well in real life and have a hassle-free experience, the ping duration must be less than 200 milliseconds. The lower the ping is, the better the browsing experience would be.

GEOlocation Test / ISP Test

While anonymity is a reason some people use proxies, the most common usage of proxies is to avoid content restrictions imposed by website owners. More often than not, you’ll need to study your competitor businesses’ products and pricing and they might ban your IP address.

Sometimes, contents are accessible only from certain countries or cities, and if you’re not a resident of that area, then the content might be out of your reach. Proxies come in handy in such situations. And the more locations a proxy service offers, the better your chances are for better performance.

Our geolocation test checks whether the proxies can mask the location data and how versatile the given proxies are in terms of locations. We also examine whether the IPs are sequential since sequential IPs are more likely to get banned if the website owner decides to ban the whole subnet.

We used an online geolocation data aggregator website iplocation.net that crawls several other websites to fetch location data.

All the proxies provided by Oxylabs.io were from their US datacenters, and this is reflected in the test result as well. One really impressive aspect of the proxies is, none of the IPs are of the same subnet. This is highly appreciable. The proxies are also from several cities, which is positive as well.

IP address compatibility Test

Our final test, the IP compatibility test determines whether the proxies are able to access the most demanding sites. This is of paramount importance since the primary objective of using a proxy will fail if you cannot access your desired website.

However since we cannot check against the millions of websites available and not all websites are used with proxies, we chose the top websites for different proxy uses. These include social media sites, ad posting sites, content streaming sites and shoe sites to cover all major proxy uses.

The test result came out as highly appreciable as the Oxylabs.io proxies were able to access all the websites in our set of testing sites. Although we found previously that the popular speed testing site speedtest.net is blocked on their proxies, since that is not the case for major websites, Oxylabs.io gets full marks on the IP compatibility test.

*IG – instagram, TW – Twitter CL – Craigslist, Pin – Pinterest, YT – YouTube, AZ -Amazon, G – Google, TM – Ticketmaster

Features of Oxylabs.io

Highly anonymous datacenter proxies

The datacenter proxies offered by Oxylabs.io are classified as high anonymous. The websites are not able to detect your original IP address, so you do not worry about your original IP address being banned.

As for residential proxies, since the proxies are automatically rotating after a few minutes from a pool of millions of proxies around the world, the probability of your proxies getting banned is extremely low.

Username and Password authentication method

You’ll need to use your username and password to enable proxies from Oxylabs.io. This is the most popular form of authenticating proxies and is supported by all programs where proxies are used. This also gives you the liberty to authenticate proxies even when you have dynamic IP.

Vast network of proxies

Although we have covered this point previously, we just can’t get enough of the huge proxy network of Oxylabs.io, covering almost the entire world. While the datacenter proxies are not as widespread as their pool of residential proxies, Oxylabs.io still has one of the biggest networks of datacenters.

Unlimited concurrent connections

Oxylabs.io also allows you to have unlimited concurrent connections. This means you can access the proxies from multiple devices at the same time. This is immensely helpful while using bots to crawl data and scrape the web.

Extensive documentation

Oxylabs.io has very detailed documentation for all their services. You can easily find the documentation along with scripts to use the proxies. Their frequently asked questions page is also able to answer most of your queries.

Session control

Although this is for residential proxies, this is a quite useful feature. Oxylabs.io lets you have control over how often, if at all, your proxies will refresh. This lets you hold on to a proxy for whatever reason for the duration of the session. The scripts to configure this can be found in their documentation.

Wow…A little so off-topic the topic, for this review should mainly introduce and discuss their data center proxies.

Signing Up for Oxylabs.io

We felt Oxylabs.io has unnecessarily complicated their sign up process. While you can easily view the price listing on their website, you cannot outright buy a package and start using the proxies.

You’ll first sign up for a trial by entering your contact details. Representatives from Oxylabs.io will contact you within 24 hours and will set you up with some trial proxies for seven days.

After the end of your trial period with Oxylab.io proxies, you’ll be able to discuss if you have any issues and pricing for custom packages.

Although this seems a bit redundant, we think this was done to comply with full customer satisfaction. However, we were not particularly satisfied as in one case, we didn’t hear from them after signing up for a trial. This is certainly not acceptable and can adversely affect their business.

How to install/use

To use the proxies allotted by Oxylabs.io, you will have to first configure your browser or the bot application with the proxy details. The username authentication method is the most common method of authenticating proxy, and all programs support this as well.

To configure, go to the settings menu and find proxy settings. Enter your IP address, port number, username and password in the settings box. Some bot applications that can work with multiple proxies can take the list of proxies as IP:Port:Username:Password format. Oxylabs.io gives the list of proxies in this format, which is very useful.

Our Editor’s Verdict

User’s Reviews & Rating