Smartproxy Review

Posted on the 02 May 2019 by Charlene Farwell

How well do you know Smartproxy? If you answer little to this question then this article has been written specifically for you. I intend to review Smartproxy so you can decide if it is the right choice for you.

Official Website https://smartproxy.com

Sample Gate.smartproxy.com:7000

Charge Mode Bandwidth (GB)

Start of Price 5 GB – $75

Pool of IPs 10 Million+

Proxy Protocol HTTP(S)

IP Rotation (Time) 10 minutes

IP Rotation (Session) Yes

Uptime User Pass + IP Auth

Filter/GEO Targeting Cites(Only 8)/Countries

Free trial No

Refund policy 3-day refund

Support Ticket + Live Chat

 

Already, the market has been proliferated with a lot of residential proxy service providers. The top 3 contenders aside Smartproxy is Luminati, GeoSurf, and Oxylabs. The 3 of them provide residential proxies to help you surf the Internet like a human.

However, they differ in their mode of operation and pricing, and customer service among others. That’s why reviewing each is required so that you can make an informed decision. This particular article discusses Smartproxy review. Just like any other proxy, Smartproxy will help you surf the Internet with another IP address other than yours. This comes handy when you intend to keep your identity secret as you browse the Internet. Unknowingly to a lot of people, a website knows a lot about them – thanks to their IP address.

An IP address is a string of numbers separated by full stops that serve as a form of identity to a computer or any device connected to the Internet. Some online forums even display this information on their user’s profiles.

Unknowingly to them, this information holds a lot of secrets that must not get into the wrong hands. An IP address can be used to discover your geographical location and system data. With Smartproxy, you can mask your own IP address and surf the Internet with IP address of real devices provided by Internet Service Providers (ISP).

An Overview of Smartproxy

Smartproxy tagline has the sentence, “use 10M+ IP right now “ – yeah, you read that correctly. Subscribing to any of their residential proxy plans gives you the opportunity to use over 10 million residential IP addresses of real devices provided by ISP as opposed to datacenter proxies that come from datacenter servers. Unlike many other proxy providers that are focused on providing many services at ones, Smartproxy’s focus is on residential proxies which make them boldly boast that they are the best residential proxy network. Well, I won’t rank them as the best among others like Oxylabs, GeoSurf, and Luminati, I can confirm that they are in the same league.

Smartproxy is a premium proxy service provider. It has been tested and trusted in dealing with web scraping and crawling, advert verification, travel fare aggregation, social media automation, SEO monitoring, and sneaker sites geolocation bypassing.

Compared to other residential proxy providers, their prices and plans are competitive. The fact that they are residential IP addresses means they are good at evading websites that have developed smart techniques to detect and block requests coming from proxy servers. This is possible because requests sent by residential proxy users arrive websites through real devices as opposed to datacenter proxies.

Because of their large pool of IP addresses, IP rotation is at its best and as such, you do not have to deal with captchas or the issue of IP blockage. This means that Smartproxy is reliable.

Even though I mentioned above that the price is competitive, it is important you note that most hobbyists and hackers looking for a place to test run their skills shy away from Smartproxy because the prices are high to them. Smartproxy appeals mostly to businesses with the financial budget to accommodate residential proxies as they are seen as more expensive compared to their datacenter counterparts. Smartproxy have also been seen as having one of the best customer support in the industry.

Visit smartproxy

Why We Recommend Smartproxy:

  • A large pool of IP addresses distributed among almost all countries of the world
  • Prices of their plans are competitive especially when buying higher plans
  • Customer support is one of the best in the industry
  • Fast compared to other residential proxies
  • It can be authenticated using both username and password or IP authentication.
  • Their dashboard is intuitive

You need to pay attention to It:

  • No free trial
  • Bandwidth is limited and you need to if you need more
Our Expert Rating and Test Results
Overall
8.9/10 8.9/10
  • Proxy Performance - 9.1/10 9.1/10
  • Anonymity - 8.9/10 8.9/10
  • Locations - 8.3/10 8.3/10
  • Success Rate - 9.1/10 9.1/10

How to use smartproxy endpoints

Subscription Prices

Take this from me as a rule of thumb, no good enough proxy is free. I see a lot of Internet users make the mistake of using free proxy services and I wonder, what are they thinking? That a company will buy server infrastructures, employ engineers, and security experts to help build and manage it and then provide the service for free? Things do not work that way – at least not yet. However, a proxy service should not get you to break a bank before you can use them.

Compared to datacenter proxies, residential proxies are usually expensive. That said, how does Smartproxy stand in terms of subscription fee and options compared to its competitors?

Smartproxy plans are sold according to bandwidth. The lowest-priced plan is known as the Micro which goes for $75 per month. In this plan, a gigabyte costs $15 and there are 5 Gb in it. As you buy more, the prices reduce. For example, if you go for the starter price which goes for $200 a month, the price of a gigabyte is $10.

A gigabyte is cheapest when you buy their advanced plan that sells for $600, with a gigabyte priced at $6. Looking at these prices, I can tell you that though they are expensive as per general proxy prices, they are competitive when it comes to the price for a residential proxy.

Smartproxy does not offer a free trial to their intending customers. If you must use their services, you must part ways with your money. This shouldn’t be a problem though since they offer a 3-day refund policy. When it comes to the option of payment, you have a variety to choose from. You can pay for a Smartproxy subscription using a credit card, PayPal, or even Bitcoin. However, if you plan to pay through Bitcoin, just be ready for a delay because you won’t get instant access. However, using the other payment mode help with instant payment confirmation.

Smartproxy internet connection speed

Spoiler alert – improvements in technology have made people demand more speed from their Internet Service Providers (ISP). In the past, all we have is the snail-speed of a 2G network. Then 3G came and changed the story. 4G came and made a lot of improvements to 3G and from the talks of industrial experts, 5G is the game-changer. Amidst all these is a service that’s notorious for reducing Internet speed – the proxy service! Yes, because of the rerouting of requests to proxy servers, speed is greatly reduced.

To measure how fast download and upload is using Smartproxy, I had to test the speed without a proxy. This is to help me get a base measurement to work with. From my speed test without using a proxy, my internet download speed was 54.72 Mbps and upload speed was 391.33 Mbps. Below is a table that shows result gotten using Smartproxy residential proxies.

Proxy Location Proxy IP Address Download Speed Upload Speed

United States 162.236.99.170 6.43 2.21

Canada 173.33.237.175 3.22 1.98

United Kingdom 82.38.68.165 6.00 0.91

Brazil 24.102.133.42 2.03 2.75

India 47.158.22.37 1.76 0.43

Looking at the table above, you will agree with me if I say Smartproxy is not the fastest residential proxy provider out there.

Security and reliability

The Internet is a horrible place to live without protecting yourself. Security is everyone business on the Internet. For a proxy provider, how secured have they made their services? Where are they located and what is the law governing data retention over there. What do they do with your browsing data? How susceptible are they to hackers? All these and many more questions are what you need to know before deciding whether a proxy is a good fit for you.

Unlike in the case of VPN that data sent from your computer are encrypted, in the case of proxies, the data aren’t encrypted – this means that if an eavesdropper gets hold of the data, you are at their mercy. Also important is the issue of IP leakage and the issue of reliability. Some proxy providers are not just reliable, their uptime metric is a mess. Their proxies get easily detected and blocked by web servers.

How does Smartproxy stand in these regards? Really, Smartproxy is one of the most secured residential proxy service providers. Their users enjoy and uptime of about 99.99 percent and no issue of IP leakage have been reported.

Also, because they are residential proxies, the issue of IP blockage is at minimal since residential IP addresses are not subject to much scrutiny. They also do not log data of their customers' activities and are not under any form of obligation to leak data to the government. Smartproxy has maintained the status quo of being one of the most secure and reliable proxies in the residential proxy market.

Smartproxy server network and distribution

How distributed are the residential IP addresses of a proxy server? Does it have a server in the country you want to browse the Internet through or it doesn’t? Do you want to browse a specific city in a country?

Really, you need answers to these questions, if you are making a buying decision with regard to proxy services. There are some proxy services that provide you proxies of specific cities and even states in a country while others only provide country-specific proxies. Unfortunately, some providers are notorious for providing proxies in only one country. I am not here to mention names, but how does Smartproxy stand in terms of server and residential proxy distribution?

Smartproxy has one of the largest pool of residential IP addresses. It has over 10 million residential IP addresses distributed unequally in almost all countries in the world. I used the word unequally on purpose – a larger part of the residential IP addresses is located in few countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, India, Canada, and Japan.

Considering the fact that most geolocation restrictions are placed by websites located in these aforementioned countries, you have nothing to worry about. Unlike their wide counties reach, they are limited in terms of city proxies as they only have 8 cities with proxies. These include London, New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, and Moscow.

However, you still need to check to make sure their network covers the region you’re interested in.

Authentication

Residential proxies are not free and as such, they are locked. For you to use them, you need to prove you have the right to use them and the way to do that is through authentication. There are different forms of authentication available. Username and password authentication are the most popular and widely used. Aside from this, some websites have device other means of authentication. For Smartproxy, aside from username and password authentication, you can also authenticate using IP authentication

  • Username and Password Authentication

Like I stated earlier, username and password authentication is the most popular. If you are using a proxy and you try surfing the Internet, you will get prompted to enter a username and password in other for the service to grant you access. While this is a very simple and easy way of authentication, it has its drawbacks. Through a password guessing technique known as brute-force, a hacker can guess your password and use out of your limited bandwidth. The issue of forgetting password is also one of the reasons people aren’t using password nowadays.

  • IP Authentication

This form of authentication is less common in other websites not in the proxy or VPN industry. Smartproxy utilizes this form of authentication to simplify the whole process of authentication. In IP authentication, you need to visit your dashboard and whitelist your computer IP address. Only IP addresses whitelisted are granted access to use your bandwidth.

Customer Support

We need to admit this; There is no perfect software – otherwise, there won’t be a need to review Smartproxy in the first place. Because products aren’t perfect, users of such products run into issues that they need clarification. How does a company tackle this is the difference between a customer-centric and a non-customer centric company.

Sometimes back, I read a book title, “The Design of Everyday Things”. This book talked about product design and how products are not as intuitive as they seem. As easy as sending a message is, some online users will still need help. That is why a company needs to have a robust system in place to respond to customers' queries and complaints.

Smartproxy has one of the best customer support in the market. In fact, they can be said to be a customer-centric business. What impressed me in this aspect is their resource section that has links to pages where you can learn more about them. They also have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page where they provide answers to the frequently asked questions. They also have a live chat system in place to help users get answers to their questions.

In case they are not online, you can also send them an email and you will get a response sooner than you expect. For a proxy provider to have a resource section, a live chat, and email in place in other to provide support for customers, such computer has their customers at heart.

Our verdict – Is Smartproxy recommended?

While I cannot say I have seen it all in terms of residential proxy service provision, I can boldly say I have had my own share of experience with residential proxies to be able to make a well-informed decision on a good and bad proxy service provider. I tell you what; Smartproxy is one of the best proxy service providers out there. It is perfect for social media automation, ads verification, web scraping, sneaker site bypassing, and SEO monitoring among others.

Even though Smartproxy has its own shortcomings, I strongly recommend it. Their prices are competitive especially if you are buying more bandwidth, they offer a 3-day refund policy, and their customer service is one of the best in the industry. I repeat, Smartproxy is highly recommended.