PrivateProxy.me Review

Recommended for: Social Media & General browsing

One of the crucial components of online marketing is to analyze the market, the trending topics, activities and pricing of competitors and similar other things that might have an impact on the business. To research and collect such a large amount of data, bots that automatically use search engines to scrape data are most effective.

However, search engines generally do not like bots and may prevent a bot from operating by banning the IP address the bot is using. This is where proxy services come in. By using a proxy IP, you can essentially replace your current IP address with the proxy IP which the search engine sees instead of your real IP address.

SEO data scraping is only one of many uses of proxy services. Due to this growth of online marketing and the availability of information on the internet, proxy services have grown too.

Out of so many good quality proxies available, it is quite hard to find out the one provider that is best suitable for you.

To help you choose the service that should perform the best for your needs, we have reviewed some of the best proxy providers in this series of private proxy reviews. In this review article, you’ll find our expert review on PrivateProxy.me, a well-known private proxy provider that has been providing service since 2011 and is a favorite of many.

To review the service of PrivateProxy.me, we bought their package of private proxies and tested the proxies for over a week. Although we focused on the proxy parameters like speed test, ping test, geolocation, and IP compatibility, we also reviewed their service from the perspective of a user to determine how user-friendly the service is. We have summarized the positive and negative aspects of the service in a table below for your convenience.

Proxy types and Pricing

The only type of service provided by PrivateProxy.me is, as their name suggests, private proxies. They do not offer VPNs or shared proxies or residential proxies.

Their private and dedicated datacenter proxies are of the high anonymous elite class and for HTTP/HTTPS IPv4 protocol only.

The pricing plans are straight-forward as well. Although you can choose the purpose you will use the proxies for, there are no specialized packages. So, the pricing plans are the same for all purposes whether it is for ticketing or social media or data scraping.

As you can see from their current pricing in the table below, the price per proxy becomes much less when you choose a larger package. This is very considerate of them and will be very helpful for small businesses.

Locations of proxy servers

PrivateProxy.me is very secretive about their proxy server locations. Apart from the fact that they have got servers in the USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands, and Hong Kong not much can be known from their website or customer support. You can manually request to have proxies from any of these locations depending on your needs after signing up.

As we bought dedicated proxies and tested the geolocations of the proxies, we found one of the proxies from Kazakhstan. The five proxies in the USA were from the states Arizona and Florida. The remaining proxies were from Germany. These proxies were received by default, and we think this is good to allocate diverse locations.

PrivateProxy.me claims that they do not resell proxies and they own all of the servers, which is a plus point. The proxies were not sequential either, which is often a concern for many since having sequential IPs increases the chance of getting a ban on the whole range of proxies.

Ping Test & Proxy Speed Test

To review their service properly, we purchased a package of 10 proxies from PrivateProxy.me and tested the first ten proxies as we do in this review series. The tests that were performed on the proxies are helpful to determine the proxy quality and suitable application of the proxies.

Speed Test:

This test we performed was to determine the bandwidth speed of the proxies. Even if the proxies are good in all other parameters, without good network speed, the browsing experience will be hampered significantly. And so, this test is of high importance.

To test the speed of the proxies, we enabled each proxy and used a popular online speed-testing website, fast.com, which is offered by Netflix.

The testing service works by connecting to the nearest Netflix server and determines the upload and download speed. This is one of the most reliable speed-testing tools online as Netflix has servers all around the world and many users use proxies to access geo-restricted Netflix contents.

Fortunately, the proxies provided by PrivateProxy.me also did well in the speed test. 70% of the proxy IPs have a bandwidth speed of 240 Mbps or more, which is remarkable. The rest are also manageable. The proxies have good upload speed as well. However, the latency is slightly more, but acceptable nonetheless.

And One Proxy Not works! I will replace this proxy later.

Ping Test:

This test is done to check the time required for the proxy server to respond to your query. Since data is transferred through the proxy server and back, it is imperative that the server responds fast.

Although, it does not always depend upon the servers, as the delay is mainly due to the distance. The further away a server is from your location, the longer it takes for the data request gets to the server which contributes to a higher ping.

Since lower ping is always preferable for a smooth browsing experience, it is also vital that you use a proxy server that’s nearer to your location when possible.

We used an online ping testing tool whoer.net to determine the ping to the proxy server from three different locations, Georgia (USA), Quebec (Canada) and London (UK). As you can see, the ping is higher for Europe proxies when checked from the USA and vice versa.

The ping for the USA proxies is remarkably low when tested from Georgia. This is really appreciable since the low ping helps when the proxies are used with bots. You also get a smooth browsing experience while browsing the internet. You can find a detailed result of our ping test below.

Geolocation/ISP Test

After two successful and positive tests, the third test we performed is the ISP test! Our geolocation test is important for us to know how diverse the locations for the default proxies are.

This gives us a hint about the proxy servers, as well as the ISP masking the provider is using. PrivateProxy.me is part of a web hosting service, so they know their servers in and out.

The proxies they provided us are well dispersed and located in the USA and Europe. The geolocation test also lets us know which location is seen by the websites when the proxy IP is used.

To perform this test, we used another web tool iplocation.net that aggregates the location data by four major location testing companies and shows in a convenient table.

We tested each proxy IP with the website to find the geolocation and ISP name. The test result showed the cities our proxies are from. We’d say the result is very positive since the proxies are from diverse locations with different ISPs. See the test result below.

IP address compatibility Test

Our last test, the IP compatibility test, is also of very high importance. Some proxy providers may offer high-quality proxies but may restrict the use of the proxies to specific sites. This is usually done to prevent proxies from getting banned or to resale banned proxies for other websites. In our IP compatibility test, we test if the proxies can access several types of high demand sites. The sites are of categories social networks, streaming, shoes, shopping, and ads.

• Guide to buying Instagram proxies for Instagram automation

We performed our IP compatibility test on the proxies we bought from PrivateProxy.me. The proxies were purchased with the purpose selected as Social Networks. Still, the proxies had no problems accessing websites other than social network sites such as Twitter, Pinterest in our test. Since it is not possible to check against all the websites, we can assume that if the top-rated websites that we included in our test are not blocked from accessing, other sites will not be either.

Features of PrivateProxy.me

Highly anonymous HTTP/HTTPS proxies

PrivateProxy.me offers proxies that are highly anonymous. These proxies are of HTTP/HTTPS IPv4 protocol and can be used by any browser or programs that support HTTP/HTTPS proxies.

Dual authentication method

PrivateProxy.me allows you to enable your proxy session by logging in using username and password or by authorizing your IP address. Both approaches have some positive and negative aspects, so it is a good option to have both and let the user decide himself.

Up to 10 authorized IPs

You can authorize up to 10 IPs which can be used to use proxies from PrivateProxy.me. While many providers let you authorize only a couple of IPs, it is a plus point for PrivateProxy.me to allow 10 IPs to be authorized.

Choosing specific locations

Although PrivateProxy.me has a small set of available options, you can request to shuffle the proxies as per your need to a specific location. This can be done after your purchase and through customer support. You can also choose to have all the proxies to be from the same location or from various locations.

Option to trial three proxies for seven days

PrivateProxy.me lets you trial up to 3 proxies for seven days. This gives you enough time to determine whether their service is suitable for you. However, subscribing to the trial requires you to provide credit card details, which is not preferred by most users.

Excellent customer care

The customer support of PrivateProxy.me is active 24/7/365, and you can reach them by live chat, Skype, email, and phone. They are very fast in replying as well.

One free swap

In each month, you can swap your IPs once for free of cost. Swapping the IPs lets you have a new set of proxies that can be used if your existing IPs stop working.

It is recommended that you swap your proxies and verify whether the performance issue is due to the proxies before you cancel your subscription or request a refund.

Instant allocation of proxies

Upon completing payment, you immediately receive an email from PrivateProxy.me with your set of proxies. You do not have to wait for any manual allocation of the proxies and you can start using the proxies as soon as you are ready.

Refund policy

Although PrivateProxy.me does not seem to have a written refund policy, they mention about a refund on their frequently asked questions section.

How to install/use

Signing Up for PrivateProxy.me

The website for PrivateProxy.me has everything on one page. This lets you choose and sign up for their service from the landing page.

After you sign up, you will be able to choose the purpose, package, and location of the proxies. You’ll find that there are more packages available than those shown on the homepage.

Currently, you can complete your payment via PayPal and Credit Card.

How to authorize

As discussed earlier, you can enable your PrivateProxy.me proxies in one of two ways, user-pass authentication or IP authorization. So, after you receive your proxies, you will have to configure your proxies according to use properly.

For IP authorization, PrivateProxy.me allows up to 10 IPs to be authorized to use the proxies. As you log in to your user control panel, you’ll find a text box to enter the authorized IPs. You can use the proxies from only the IPs you have authorized.

You can also choose to use username and password authentication. This gives you another layer of security but is somewhat cumbersome to enter proxy details and user-pass every time you need to change proxy. An easy solution to this is to use the IP:Port:username:password format that is provided by PrivateProxy.me and which is supported by almost all of the bots.

Our Editor’s Verdict

User’s Reviews & Rating