Founded in 2004, Hostinger is an experienced Lithuanian web hosting provider with 1,000+ employees and more than a million subscribers around the world.

Datanyze' Web Hosting Market Share report ranks Hostinger in 36th place, used by around 71,000 companies, for 0.5% of the hosting market. Hostinger isn't just building its own service, though: it has developed and launched new brands and products, including web host Hosting24 and the free 000webhost. 

In this review, we test Hostinger by creating a functioning WordPress website and signing up to Hostinger's Premium shared plan. We then monitor our site's performance, including speed and uptime and have a go using all the features available in the plan. We also go as far as utilizing Hostinger's customer support with a real issue we came across during our test. 

What sort of hosting plans does Hostinger offer? 

Hostinger offers cheap shared hosting for small to medium low-traffic sites. VPS hosting and cloud hosting give your website more resources for extra speed, making them suitable for more demanding, business-critical sites. (How demanding? A good VPS can run a WordPress site with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.)

Hostinger doesn't have any dedicated server products, which is bad news if you're looking for the maximum performance and reliability. 

But by way of compensation for at least some users, Hostinger is one of the few big hosting names to offer pre-configured Minecraft server hosting from under $10 a month.

Which plan is right for you? Next, we'll explore Hostinger's shared, VPS and WordPress hosting range, break down what they offer, what they don't, and help identify the best choices for you.

Hostinger shared hosting

Shared hosting works just as the name suggests: your site is stored on a web server along with many others, and everyone shares the server costs and resources. It's cheap and relatively easy to use, and although this is the slowest hosting type, shared plans may still be able to handle sites with tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Hostinger's shared hosting starts with the Single plan. It's cheap at $1.99 a month over four years ($3.99 on renewal), and has some welcome features: free SSL, easy WordPress installation and management. But it also has many limits: support for one website, no free domain, 50GB storage, a single email account, 100GB bandwidth, backups are weekly only. If you know exactly what you need, and this works, great; otherwise, it's best ignored.

The Premium plan is still cheap at $2.99 a month initially ($6.99 on renewal), but lifts or removes all those limits: there's support for 100 websites, a free domain, 100GB storage, 100 email addresses and unlimited bandwidth. Backups are still only weekly, which is a significant weakness.

The top-of-the-range Business plan adds the much-needed daily backups, though, and throws in Cloudflare's CDN (Content Delivery Network) for maximum speeds. It's priced from $4.99 a month for the first four years, $8.99 on renewal.

These are feature-packed products that performed very well in our speed tests, and are great value for what you're getting. The Business plan is our pick of the range. It's more capable than products twice the price from some other hosts, and Hostinger suggests it can handle sites of up to approximately 100,000 visitors a month.

Also consider HostGator, whose feature-packed shared hosting is great value, speedy in testing, and has some surprising bonus features for demanding users (free SSL upgrade and a dedicated IP in the business plan). 

Hostinger WordPress hosting

WordPress is the world's favorite website creator, a versatile platform which works for everyone from hosting newbies building a tiny family site, to international corporations with the most business-critical web projects.

Hostinger has strong WordPress support across most of its ranges, ensuring there's a solution for just about everyone.

The Single WordPress plan is extremely basic (supports one website, a single email address, no free domain, few resources, reduced speeds.) But it has easy WordPress installation, weekly backups, and (Hostinger claims) can handle up to 10,000 visitors a month. The plan's real appeal is its price, though, at only $1.99 a month over four years, $3.99 on renewal. It could work as a cheap way to learn WordPress, assuming you're only building the most basic of sites.

The Business WordPress plan is our pick of the range. It's significantly more expensive at $6.99 a month over four years, $16.99 on renewal. But it has far more capable specs - 100 websites, 100 email addresses, free domains, handles up to 100k visitors a month - and adds valuable extras including staging (a valuable website testing feature) and Cloudflare CDN (a major speedup plus). This is a capable plan with the power to cope with more demanding personal and small to medium business sites.

If your needs are even greater - you've several business-critical sites, or maybe a busy web store where speed is absolutely vital - then Hostinger's 'Hosting for Agencies' range might help. It has all the same WordPress features, but makes it easier to manage and control access to multiple sites, and boosts performance by giving you far more server resources.

The Agency Pro plan is our pick of the range: it gives you twice the resources of the Business WordPress plan, but it's still very affordable at $14.99 a month over four years ($49.99 on renewal).

Consider IONOS, too. Its Business WordPress plan has free SSL, a free domain and daily backups, but it's just $0.50 a month for the first year, ideal if you're looking to learn WordPress and see if it's right for you. 

Hostinger VPS hosting 

Signing up for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gets you a private area in a web server with your own system resources. This automatically gives any VPS a speed advantage over shared hosting, and the more resources your plan includes (CPU time, RAM, storage space) the faster it's likely to be. If your site has 100k visitors a month or more, or it's especially demanding and 

Hostinger offers eight VPS plans, giving you plenty of choice. They start cheap at only $3.49 a month over four years ($6.99 on renewal) for an extremely basic 1 CPU core, 1GB RAM and 20GB storage VPS, but they ramp up from there, and the top-of-the-range VPS plan offers 8 cores, 16GB RAM and 250GB storage for $77.99 a month over four years ($131.99 on renewal).

The range is fair value, but it won't work for everyone. One reason Hostinger's prices are low is that their VPS plans are unmanaged. That means Hostinger doesn't monitor the operating system, set up the firewall, install security patches or do anything similar: you're left to manage the server's system software yourself. That's manageable for experts, and if you know what you're doing, the extra control can even be an advantage. But it's a potentially complicated hassle for everybody else.

There are some technical limitations, too. Hostinger's VPS plans get a 100Mbps connection to the outside world, for instance, which sounds good, but it's less than many top providers, and could get swamped if you're running busy sites with many simultaneous visitors.

If low prices are a must, consider IONOS. Its most basic VPS starts at $2 billed monthly, even a 6 core, 12GB RAM system is only $35 a month billed annually ($18 for the first six months), and all plans include a 400Mbps network connection.

But if it's choice you're after, look at Hostwinds. It has cheap unmanaged VPS from $4.99 billed monthly, but there's a managed VPS range (where Hostwinds does all the low-level server management for you) starting at only $8.24 a month. All plans are more configurable, there's Windows hosting if you need it, more powerful systems at the top of the range, and 1Gbps network speeds keep performance high even at peak times.

Does Hostinger have a website builder?

If you don't have a website yet, and WordPress seems a little intimidating, a website builder may be the easiest way to get started. Typically, they'll have a gallery of pre-built website designs you can use to get started. Adding pictures, videos, maps and other page elements is as easy as dragging and dropping, and customizing the content with your own text and photos works much like any editor.

Hostinger has its own website builder, which comes with unmetered traffic, unlimited free SSL certificates, web hosting, up to 100 websites, free domain, free email, ecommerce features, plus more.

We found it to be a simple and straightforward tool that we could use right away. No need to spend an age scrolling through feature lists, comparing plans or wondering what you can afford: just hand over your email address to create an account and you can start building right away.

The editor is relatively basic, but the online shop’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor will give you tools to create detailed descriptions with HTML titles.

Hostinger website builder costs $2.79 per month and is a decent website builder for personal use and small sites. There's not enough power here for business applications, and even if your site took off and became a real success, there's no upgrade path to help you cope with the extra demand.

HostGator’s Gator website builder is worth considering as a value alternative. It's fractionally more expensive, but has more features, and supports an unlimited web store for physical and digital products. If features are more important than price, Wix has more templates, more features, more power in every area, and is an absolute must for your shortlist.

 Can you build a web store with Hostinger? 

Hostinger doesn't have a specialist ecommerce website builder plan like we see with many providers, but there are a couple of routes you can take to begin selling online.

The simplest option, as we've discussed above, is to sign up with Hostinger's website builder service. With Hostinger Website Builder, users can add up to 500 products to their online store and over 20 popular payments are currently supported. It could be enough to run a simple home business.

If you need something more capable, the alternative is to sign up with one of Hostinger's other hosting plans, then install and use a specialist ecommerce platform. WooCommerce is probably the best-known option. It's a hugely capable WordPress plugin, which Hostinger can automatically install on any hosting plan, and includes all the product cataloging, inventory managing, payment taking and worldwide shipping integrations you need.

If you're happy with Hostinger's shared or VPS hosting, and you're willing to take the time to learn about WooCommerce and web stores in general, this could be a cost-effective solution.

But if you'd like hosting with specific web store features, and more help in getting your project online, it's worth considering some alternatives. Bluehost has an excellent WooCommerce hosting plan with payment processing and a stack of essential sales and marketing tools. IONOS has even more options, including a simple online store builder, a WooCommerce plan, and hosting for a bunch of other ecommerce platforms: Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart and more.

Hostinger's performance

We rounded off the review by using Uptime.com to monitor our test website from multiple locations around the world, logging response times and any downtime.

Our test site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, but still managed a solid 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Uptime.com recorded a response time range of 171ms to 1.73s, with an average of 382ms, over the last seven days of testing. Starter shared hosting plans typically manage 200-400ms with an average peak of 700-800ms, so Hostinger is clearly on the slow side when it comes to response times.

Page load times matter too, though, so we used Dotcom Tools' Website Speed Test to measure our site performance from 16 locations around the US and Europe. This time the results were much better at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.

A mixed story, then, but keep in mind these are comparisons based on the cheapest shared hosting plan from each test provider. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x the $1.39 you could pay with Hostinger, so on balance we think the company did reasonably well.

How fast is Hostinger?

Our web host performance tests start by measuring uptime, the proportion of time your website remains accessible to visitors. We set up a test WordPress site on a Hostinger shared hosting package, then used Uptime.com to access it every five minutes for 14 days and report the results.

Hostinger achieved 99.98% uptime, which was a little disappointing (because we expected a perfect performance over such a short test) though still very acceptable overall (because it's still significantly better than the 99.9% uptime guarantee offered by most web hosts).

We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value known technically as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website is likely to pop up onto the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.

Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator. It's not significantly ahead of the competition - most providers have an LCP in the 0.60 to 0.80 area - but it suggests Hostinger isn't cutting corners to hit its low shared hosting prices. It really can compete with the likes of Bluehost and HostGator.

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed some drops in performance at peak load, but that's what we would expect for a shared hosting package. Overall, it was able to handle 15 requests per second throughout the test, a typical result for most providers.

These are broadly positive results, and show Hostinger performs better than most budget hosts. But keep in mind that our figures are based on testing a shared plan, and if you're opting for VPS, dedicated hosting or any other product, your experience may be very different.

How easy is Hostinger to use? 

Hostinger doesn't offer cPanel to its shared hosting users, opting to use its custom hPanel platform, instead. Custom control panels make us wary, probably because most of them are underpowered in the extreme, but hPanel is a rare exception.

It looks similar to cPanel, for instance, with server details (location, IP address) in a sidebar, and colorful icons representing individual features, organized into sensibly-named groups: Domains, Emails, Files, WordPress and so on.

Most functions are accessible to even novice users. Create an email address, for instance, and you're only asked for the address and a password. But a sidebar adds more advanced tools, from importing existing emails, to setting up SPF and DKIM records (to authenticate emails and protect against phishing) in just a few clicks.

Custom control panels still aren't good news for hosting experts, as all their cPanel experience doesn't count for much; they're left to browse the menus and options, much like anybody else.

Overall, though, hPanel offers a good mix of power and ease of use, and the platform provides everything you need to get your site up and running quickly.

How good is Hostinger's support? 

Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn't have telephone support. There's 24/7 live chat, though, and email or ticket support if you prefer.

We opened a ticket asking how we could install WordPress on a subdomain. That's not a complicated technical issue, but it's more involved than a simple product question, and gave us a better chance of getting an interesting response.

The reply arrived only 17 minutes later, just about as speedy as we could expect for ticket support. (Who needs live chat, anyway?)

The text used more jargon than we’d like, but was accurate and included all the detail we needed to figure out a solution.

Live chat is also available whenever you need it. We never waited more than a couple of minutes for a response, and agents were just as quick at identifying our issues and coming up with relevant and useful advice.

A web knowledgebase is on hand if you prefer the DIY approach. We'd recommend ignoring the Search box (it does a poor job of finding the best articles), and just browse the categories further down the page. There are hundreds of articles arranged into topics such as hPanel, cPanel, DNS, SSL Certificates and more.

These articles are often short, and not always organized or presented as you'd expect. The site does have plenty of useful advice on carrying out specific tasks, though, even when they're not about Hostinger's own services. 

If your domain is managed by another registrar, for instance, most hosting providers don't give you any real advice on how to modify DNS records. But Hostinger has separate articles for managing DNS at Bluehost, GoDaddy, IONOS, Namecheap, HostGator, SiteGround, WordPress.com, DreamHost’s, and many more: 30+ providers in total. 

There's clearly work to do here, but Hostinger scores well in most areas, and overall delivers a far better quality of support than most budget providers.

Final verdict: Is Hostinger right for you?

Even Hostinger’s cheapest shared hosting plan lets you create a professional email address, and you can create multiple email addresses with the more expensive plans. This simple offering makes Hostinger stand out, and is quite useful.

Hostinger is a great option for beginners simply because the service is straightforward to use and comes with a lot of additional help and support. Its low pricing is also extremely attractive and because Hostinger doesn't hold back on features and add-ons including in each package, it's definitely value for money in our opinion.

As we mentioned above, we wouldn't recommend its shared hosting plans for extremely busy websites but Hostinger performed adequately during our test so you may not need to completely rule them out if you're looking for an affordable option.

Hostinger FAQs 

Let’s face it, every proxy provider makes big claims about its speed, but Tel Aviv-based NetNut takes it even further than most: 

'Unbeatable prices', the website boasts, with speeds that are 'Lightning- fast' and ‘The fastest in the market,’ ensuring you  'Never Run Out of IP Addresses.'

This is more than just marketing spin, though. While most proxy providers use peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to source their residential IPs, NetNut works with a company called DiviNetworks to acquire them directly from more than 100 ISPs globally. With the usual reliance on end users replaced by direct ISP connectivity, NetNut eliminates a major performance bottleneck to ensure it can scale up better to handle large-scale tasks.

As a very welcome bonus, because these IPs aren't tied to real user devices, you don't have to worry that they'll go poof at any moment. Also, you get to decide how long to keep them for.

These static residential proxies are NetNut's premium product, with 1 million IPs in over 50 countries with 24/7 availability. But if they've overkill for your project, the company also offers more than 52 million rotating residential proxies worldwide (including P2P-sourced IPs), and 110K+ US datacenter for simpler scraping tasks.

NetNut: Plans and pricing

NetNut used to have a focus on the high-end business market, but these days it has plans for just about every level of user.

The company's US datacenter plans start at just $100 a month for 100GB bandwidth, for instance. There are no concurrency limits to get in your way, so you can run as many connections as you need. The starter plan doesn't have live support - it's email-only - but that's no great surprise as this plan is called ‘Starter.’

Ramping up to the Advanced plan gets you 250GB bandwidth for $185 a month, with live support thrown in (although chat is via Skype, which is hardly convenient.) The $350 Production plan offers 500GB bandwidth and a dedicated account manager, and at the upper end of the range, the Master Plan costs $1000 a month for 2TB traffic.

These plans are not the lowest priced you can find, especially for smaller needs, and you might find better deals at specific price points. The Smartproxy Micro plan gives you 8GB traffic for only $80 a month, for instance, which looks relatively cheap. But NetNut scales up well, and overall, its prices are competitive with the top proxy providers.

NetNut's rotating residential proxy comes in a choice of six tiers. The cheapest gives you 20GB for $300 monthly, or $15/GB. Moving up the scale gets you more bandwidth and also extra features. For example, the $800 Production plan supports 100GB traffic, and adds IP allow-listing and a dedicated account manager. And the top-of-the-range $4,000 a month Master plan offers 1TB of traffic, and adds API access and City/ State selection.

NetNut's Datacenter Proxies follow the same pricing pattern. At the bottom is the Starter Plan for $100/month, which provides 100GB, but has only email support. Higher tiers add live support, along with a dedicated account manager.

There are also mobile proxies available, at a cost that starts at $950 monthly for the 50 GB plan.

Again, these are reasonable value for customers with substantial needs, but could be expensive for simpler applications. Beware the feature restrictions, too: even budget providers typically include IP allow-listing, but that's a premium feature here. Read the small print carefully and make sure a plan is giving you everything you need.

There is some good news, though. NetNut offers a free 7-day trial, although this is a short time to get set up, and see how the service works for you. 

NetNut: Features

NetNut's ISP-sourced proxies bring several benefits, as we've seen. Essentially, you get the stability and performance of data center IPs, combined with the resilience and stealth of residential IPs.

These IPs are accessed via what NetNut calls its 'Super proxies,' load balancers which accept the request and allocate you 'The IP address which is most likely to be available in the requested location.' 

There’s no limit to the number of concurrent requests you can send, and in fact NetNut recommends that users initiate as many concurrent sessions as possible for best results. They claim to have customers who send more than 30 million requests every day.

NetNut says that you can use its proxies with all websites, including search engines. The company also offers optimized private proxy pools based on your target to ensure maximum success rates.

The company doesn't offer much in the way of management tools to simplify your use of the service. Smartproxy has its multi-session X Browser, a zero-coding Smart Scraper tool, a Firefox extension, and more. Unfortunately, NetNut used to have a Chrome extension, which is removed from their website, and we couldn't find it when searching the Chrome store. Too bad, as the Chrome browser is more popular than FireFox.

NetNut: Interface and use

Signing up for NetNut's data center proxies is simple: just choose a plan and hand over your cash (credit cards and Alipay are supported.) If you're after the residential or ISP proxies, you'll need to contact the company and a representative will walk you through the signup process.

Logging into the NetNut site took us to its web dashboard. This is fairly basic, with little more than the details of your plan, account and billing information, and areas for assorted metrics and usage stats.

We also were not quite sure how to get started. There's a FAQ, but it's the pre-sales type, lacking in the kind of useful detail. We did also look at the blog, which was more useful, and regular and recent content that will be of help to novice users.

There is some relevant information in the Setup Guide. Sign up and NetNut sends you an email with very basic details, and an Implementation Guidelines page had sample code for C#, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Node.js and cURL to cover the likely use case scenarios. The problem here is that these are just a few lines of text, with no background explanation at all, or even any working examples. For example, the entire 'Proxy with sticky IP' section is just these two lines:

proxy server: http://gw.ntnt.io

proxy user: username-dc-country_code-sid-any_number (up to 8 digits)

Uh, what are the country codes? What's the significance of the eight-digit number? These aren't difficult problems, but we expect better presentation, and frankly a little more guidance from a service when you might be paying thousands of dollars a month for.

If you run into difficulties, you could contact support. This is less convenient than usual, with email-only contact on the lesser plans and live chat via Skype, and response times aren't always good (we asked what had happened to the Chrome proxy extension one Sunday evening, for instance, and there was still no reply by the next morning.) But the team has no issues with general operation questions, and we've found they give helpful and accurate advice for most setup and troubleshooting issues. We also did find links for WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord and a live chat, but no phone number. There are also direct emails, with a separate one for sales, and another for support.

NetNut: Final verdict

NetNut's ISP-sourced proxies give it a major advantage over the standard rotating residential competition, but the company doesn't make much effort to simplify setup and usage. Furthermore, compared to the competition, it's relatively costly for small-scale use. It does deliver the features you need for most applications, though, and the seven-day trial shows the company is confident in the service. If you've a demanding project and regular rotating proxies won't do, give NetNut a try, and see if it fits your bill.

We've also highlighted the best proxy and best VPN

Storm Proxies is a small-scale proxy service provider which, at first glance, might not look like it has much to offer - but the reality could be a little different.

The company's over 7,200,000 proxies can't match the millions you'll get from the top competition, for instance. Geo-targeting is mostly limited to very wide regions (USA, EU, Worldwide; US city coverage is Cheyenne, Los Angeles and New York.) Support is limited, and you only get a short 24 hours to try out the service.

But on the plus side, Storm Proxies isn't trying to pretend it's something it isn't, a one-stop solution to all your proxy needs. It does have worthwhile products to offer, including rotating dedicated and residential HTTP/HTTPS proxies, and dedicated proxies targeted at social media, ticket, sneaker and other sites. And great value pricing could make it a smart choice for small-time scrapers, social media managers and anyone else on an extreme budget.

Storm Proxies: Plans and pricing

Storm Proxies offers three types of proxies. These are rotating residential proxies, private dedicated proxies which offer data center IPs, and backconnect rotating proxies which have a mix of data center and residential IPs. 

Each of these proxies offers have multiple plans, all of which offer unlimited bandwidth. Instead of capping data transfers, Storm Proxies limits its their accounts by other factors. 

For instance, the private dedicated proxies limit accounts on the number of IPs. The smallest plan offers just 5 private proxies for $10/month, while the top most one offers 400 private proxies for $640400/month. All of these plans can run 100 concurrent threads, and supports multiple subnets. 

Backconnect rotating proxies are priced on the number of simultaneous connections. For $39/month you can run 40 simultaneous connections from a single access IP, all the way up to $97 a month for 150 simultaneous connections from up to three access IP’s. 

Finally, there’s the rotating residential proxies, and these with prices get based on the number of ports. Each port can run a maximum of 50 simultaneous connections. Each plan gets a certain number of ports that it can run, with access to the full 700k residential IP proxies, along with unlimited bandwidth. These plans start at $50/month for 5 ports, and go all the way up to 50 ports for $300/month. 

Other variations include proxy rotation times (there are 3, 5 and 15 minute options available.) The service also offers smaller and larger plans as well as specialized plans for specific targets, such as for sneakers or tickets. For example, you can get 5 private Twitter proxies for only $15 a month, which includes unlimited bandwidth.

Storm Proxies: Signing up

Storm Proxies does its best to point you in the right product direction. When we chose a regular residential IP rotating plan, for instance, the site warned 'these proxies are not for scraping search engines,', and pointed us to its dedicated rotating proxy page, instead. 

With the product identifiedFind the product you need, when trying to purchaseand Storm Proxies goes to unusual lengths for credential verificationto verify your details, asking for your name, email address and even phone number-  (you'll even be sent a code to verifyverification code by text, so this has to be correct.) 

Providing this level of personal detail always makes us uneasy. Still, if it means fewer customers abusing the service, and so fewer IP bans, there's a benefit for everyone.

Payment is supported by credit card (Visa, Amex, Mastercard an Discover), or PayPal, and Amazon Pay, but handing over your cash is still a little more difficult than it needs to be. The payment form assumes you're in the US, and rather than asking you to enter any PayPal account address, demands you use a US PayPal account and enter a zip code. There's a quick fix - choose your own country from the menu top-right - but this is still an odd issue we've not seen anywhere else.

Storm Proxies: Interface

We are pleased that Storm Proxies' web dashboard is just about as simple a setup as we've ever seen. An opening page displays your plan, renewal date and a Cancel link; and (for instance) your Residential Rotating Proxies page lists your proxies in IP:Port form, with a single access IP and a US or EU location selector. 

This is implemented in the most basic way possible, too. You'd hope the Access IP would set itself to your current IP by default, right? Unfortunately, this is not the case as But no: it's set to 1.1.1.1, and it requires a manual change to do something else you must change it manually. 

And, well, if you've got a list of 100 proxies, user might expect thatthe least the dashboard could do a is give you a Save As CSV or TXT, yes? Uh, no: it's just a plain textbox, and you'll have to do a copy and paste job to transfer your proxy details to anywhere else. 

Individual plans have their own technical limitations, too. As we mentioned, residential rotating proxies only support IP authentication, for instance, and you're only allowed one access IP, a hassle if you need to access the service from more than one network or device. Squid Proxies supports up to ten IPs, for more convenience. 

Our residential plan had no control over IP rotation time, either as: it gets's fixed at 5 minutes.

Storm Proxies: Interface and use

Although our Storm Proxies dashboard looked like it had been thrown together by someone in an afternoon (and that's with some time for a couple of not so short coffee breaks), there's a plus side: there is a minimal to no learning curveyou've almost nothing to learn. 

If you've some proxy experience, you'll figure out what to do at firsta glance. Here's the list of proxies; it's in IP:port format, so users don't have to worry about usernames and passwords.; you just need to put your real IP in the Access IP box, copy and paste the proxies and you’re ready to go. 

Even if you're a newbie, don’t won't waste your time wandering around looking for advanced settings- there simply are not any to be found, because there aren't any.

If you do run into any difficulties, Storm Proxies has a help site with advice. It's also basic in the extreme, although some articles do highlight details which aren't easy to spot elsewhere. 

For example, the 'What gateway to choose for rotating proxies?' article recommends that 'the number of threads for the harvester should not exceed 25% of the number of threads allowed for your account,' which is not something most users might have guessed otherwise. 

If the you don't find an answer is not inn the knowledge base, then you can contact Storm Proxies support directly. The company claims to offer 24/7 Premium Support,', but there's no live chat, and its own stats aren't that impressive: the company says '45% of emails are replied [sic] under one hour,', but it may take up to 24 hours to reach all the rest. Not a disaster, but not what we'd call 'Premium,', either. We also think the lack of a direct phone number, a chat, or a direct email are areas this service falls short, with the single option for direct contact a support portal.

Storm Proxies: Final verdict

Storm Proxies won't win over anyone with the shorter length of its feature list, and some of its issues, such as the inability to target specific countries outside the US, make it unusable for many proxy-related tasks. 

But if you can live However, for those that can work within its limits, Storm Proxies gives you a capable basic service from just a few dollars a month, that can scale to larger plans as your needs grow and that's just fine with us. Go give it a try.

We've also highlighted the best proxy and best VPN

If you've got the idea that many proxy service providers exist in a very grey area, you'd probably be right. Oxylabs works hard to explain how it's different, though as this Lithuanian-based provider operates purely in a legit white zone since 2015.

The company has over 100 million proxies spanning 195 countries worldwide, so you're not left wondering where they came from. The website boasts that they're ethically sourced 'from vetted suppliers that are under strict obligations to inform end-users about their participation in a proxy network and acquire consent from them.'

Rather than a focus on small scale Ticketmaster or sneaker proxies, Oxylabs pitches its service for big business use cases, for example ad verification, brand protection and SEO monitoring.

And while small providers leave you crossing your fingers and hoping they deliver what they promise, Oxylabs uses only certified data centers and upstream providers, and its plans are even insured by Lloyds (that's coverage for 'Technology Errors & Omissions (Technology E&O) and Cyber insurance', if you're curious.)

Oxylabs: Plans and pricing

Oxylabs has a rather large portfolio of products that includes residential, data center, mobile, rotating ISP and SOCKS5 proxies.

You can also opt for general purpose search engine or e-commerce scraper APIs. There's even a Web Unblocker plan which leverages AI and machine learning for a high success rate. Oxylabs claims it has ‘Human like browsing’ to bypass CAPTCHA’s, has adaptive HTML parsing, dynamic fingerprinting and JavaScript rendering to automatically retry if it runs into any problems.

Oxylabs’ dedicated datacenter proxies start at $180/month for your choice of 100 US datacenter IPs, or60 in the rest of world, which works out to $1.8/IP. The cost comes down with higher tiered plans, such as to $1.2/IP with its top-end $6000/month plan that includes 5000 US IPs, or2500 in the rest of the world.

Residential proxy plans start at $300/month and offer 25 GB of bandwidth, which comes to $12/GB. At the other end of the residential proxy spectrum, you’ll get 100 GB at $800/month, which translates to only $8/GB. For those at the smaller end of the spectrum, there is also a Pay As You Go plan available for the more occasional user. 

The cheapest residential proxy plans can be purchased online, allowing you to get started with the service right away. The higher end plans do ask you to contact sales, where you talk to a representative about your precise requirements for a custom quote.

Some plans offer a 7-day free trial.

Oxylabs: Features

Oxylabs charges above average prices, but browse the feature list and it becomes understandable. Its products are built for large-scale projects, with few of the limits you'll find elsewhere.

There are no restrictions on concurrent sessions, for instance, and there are no extra charges, either. Just go ahead and do what you need to do, and Oxylabs should be able to cope.

Geo-targeting allows you to work at the country, state or city level for maximum flexibility with your projects. Compare that to the extreme budget end of the market, where, for instance, some Storm Proxies plans have only two targeting options, US and EU, and you can see what you're paying for with Oxylabs.

Subnets also have no set limits either. The company says that if you buy 1000 proxies (for instance), you can generally have from 4 to 1000 subnets, 'depending on your business needs.'

Furthermore, there's support for authenticating proxy access by username and password, or a trusted IP address. Some providers limit you to a set number of IPs, and on the lowest tiers you're only allowed a single one. Oxylabs doesn't just allow you to add as many specific IPs as you need, you can even add ranges (192.168.1.0/24.)

However you set up your requests, Oxylabs claims excellent performance, with an average 99.95% success rate and 0.6s proxy speed across its over 100 million residential IP’s.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to fully talk about Oxylabs web scraper IPs, known as Web Unblocker, but they're just as comprehensive as the rest of the service. It can perform human like browsing, and even get past CAPTCHA’s. The SERP Scraper API targets cities across 195 countries, extracts the precise data points you need from all kinds of search engine pages, and delivers them in CSV or JSON. 

You can even decide where to store the data, if the standard S3 or Google Cloud storage isn't right: now that's seriously flexible.

Oxylabs: Interface and use

Purchase an Oxylabs plan, log into your new account and you're taken to the company's web dashboard- the one-stop proxy management hub.

There's more to learn and do here than with most of the competition, but for good reason: as we've seen Oxylabs has significantly more features than just about anybody else.

When getting started, for instance, you're prompted to create one or more sub-users to help manage your projects. This isn't just about authentication via a username and password, though, as you can also opt to limit the traffic a particular sub-user can consume, which is a handy way to manage your bandwidth allocation.

It's similar elsewhere in the dashboard. Oxylabs isn't doing anything particularly complicated, it's just giving you extra powerful options that are lacking elsewhere. While regular proxy lists just come in plain text, for instance, Oxylabs can show them in JSON. And a Statistics page shows you how your projects are proceeding in full detail, including target domains, traffic used, number of requests, errors and more.

A knowledge base covers everything you need to know, from the dashboard basics to more advanced options to help customize the service for your precise needs. 

The Integrations page has useful tutorials on how to work with Jarvee, Octoparse, Puppeteer, Proxifier and many other third-party tools, for instance. Also, the more technical Developer's documentation  is excellent with high quality articles and guides for using the service.

If you need more, though, Oxylabs offers live chat 24/7, andwe got helpful responses within a couple of minutes. You can raise a ticket, or send an email, but we did not find a direct phone number to just talk to your account manager. Others claim to have 'premium' support, but Oxylabs actually delivers it, and it's great to have that level of resource available when you're managing a heavy-duty proxy project.

Oxylabs: Final verdict

Oxylabs is a premium service at a premium price, and its high starter fees, bandwidth costs and steeper-than-average learning curve mean it's overkill for most small scale and freelancer projects. For those that have a need for a top-quality provider and you'll make good use of its many features, including the comprehensive list of multiple proxy types, then Oxylabs should be right at the top of your proxy provider shortlist.

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It may not have quite the profile of the big-name proxy service competition, as Smartproxy is a relative newcomer starting in 2018. It still is an excellent platform which delivers a pile of proxy features and functionality for a very fair price for its over 50,000 users.

The company's 50+ million rotating residential IPs across over 195 worldwide locations in every country you can think of should cover you for most applications, for instance, and there are also 40K regular US Datacenter proxies (with dedicated proxies if you need them.) There are also city specific proxies for all major cities, everywhere from Berlin, Houston, Moscow to London.

Also, don’t think that you’re restricted by concurrency limits or per-proxy pricing, either. You're able to use the entire pool with unlimited connections, and the Smartproxy website claims 'your social media bot can juggle thousands of accounts per minute.'

Unlimited connection requests don't help you much if they're blocked, but Smartproxy offers various ways to avoid that trouble. Its '100% successful' Search Engine Proxies enable hassle-free Google scraping, while its X Browser generates unique user profiles to reduce the chance of IP bans or captchas. There’s also over 10 million mobile proxies on 3G, 4G, and even 5G networks.

If you've already got your own preferred scrapers, SEO or proxy managers, no problem, Smart Proxy works with just about anything. Its integration page points users to setup guides for ScrapeBox, Octoparse, Apify, Jarvee, Follow Like, NikeSlayer and a whole lot more.

Plans and pricing

Smartproxy prices start at just $7.50+VAT billing monthly for its Teeny Dedicated Datacenter plan. While the price is low, that gets you only 3 IPs, but there's no traffic limit and you're allowed unlimited targets. All plans work on HTTP(s) and SOCKS5 protocols.

Smartproxy's other plans have higher monthly prices for more proxies.  The Mini Datacenter plan gives you 50 IPs to spread around its 40,000 rotating US datacenter proxies, for instance, with one proxy user at a cost of $95 +VAT monthly. 

Need more? The Main plan delivers 200 IPs for $320+VAT per month. There are also Enterprise plans available that start with 500 IPs monthly for $750, and can scale to even higher levels if needed. 

Residential proxies start at $12.50/month, giving you 15GB of traffic (that's $12.50 per GB.) As with the datacenter plans, opting for a higher subscription can save you money. The Regular plan offers 50GB of traffic for $400 (that's $8 per GB), and if you ask Smartproxy for a quote, the company says it can offer 1TB or more traffic at 'industry leading prices.' 

A limitation is that there's no free plan and no trial, but you are protected by a 3-day money-back guarantee. Hand over your cash, and if the service doesn't live up to its promises, ask within 3 days and you'll get a refund. Also, there are only monthly prices, and we did not find discounts for committing to the annual plan. 

There's support for paying via credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay and also Apple Pay.

These are fair prices, generally less than you'll pay with Bright Data and some other top names. Although if your needs are simple, you can get started more cheaply elsewhere. Squid Proxies, for instance, gives you 10 dedicated data center proxies for $24 a month, with no bandwidth limits.

Getting started

Signing up with Smartproxy gets you access to its web-based 'smartdashboard', where you can view and manage your products.

We started in the Authentication section, which allowed us to define how we could access our proxies. Smartproxy defaults to username:password authentication by default, but it also supports allow-listed IPs (potentially more convenient as there's no need to set up login details, Smartproxy knows your requests are legitimate simply because they come from your IP address.) 

It’s certainly an advantage to have both (for example, competitor Squidproxiyes only has IP-based authentication), however, Smartproxy only allows very short lists on the lesser plans. Its Micro option on the Residential Plans only allows a single allow-listed IP address, for instance, and even the next tier up, Starter, limits the account to just three. 

Smartproxy's Endpoint Generator uses your authentication and other preferred options (location, rotating or 'sticky' session type, endpoint:port or HTTP output format). It can also generate a proxy list. It’s as easy as copying and pasting this into your preferred software (or savinge and importing it as a CSV or TXT file) and you're good to go.

Smartproxy Apps

Smartproxy also supplies some custom apps of its own to help you get more from your proxies.

X Browser is a multi-session browser for Windows and Mac which enables creating multiple Chrome profiles, each with a different fingerprint. Profiles can be customized, via options for a timezone, OS type, webRTC, proxy location and more. Once it's set up, you're able to open new Chrome windows for those profiles, each assigned a different IP, with a click.

Smart Scraper also has a Chrome extension  which, in theory, allows you to select and extract elements from a web page, then save them in JSON and CSV, no coding required. It is easy enough to add to the Chrome browser, with a link provided directly from the SmartProxy page. From there, you can specify a location, and a choice of proxy rotation. A subscription plan is required for use.  

Proxy Generator is a Windows and Mac desktop app for generating proxy lists of up to 49,999 lines.

There's also a simple Chrome and Firefox extension which enables testing the proxies direct from your browser. In a click or two you can set up your authentication, choose a location, a session type (rotating proxies or 'sticky') and get connected.

We weren't impressed by the non-functional Smart Scraper, and you may not need all (or maybe any) of these apps. X Browser and the browser extensions worked well for us, though, and it's good to see a service which gives its users these extra options.

Support

Smartproxy's support starts on its website, where there's a simple FAQ, some more in-depth tutorials, and a scattering of code examples (C#, Golang, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby). We also found a blog which gets multiple new articles a month, and also case studies.

Although the individual articles are generally short, there's more content than you might expect. The Setup Guide section alone has eight areas (Browser, Operating System, Smartphone, Proxy Managers, Sneaker Bots, Social Media Tools, Scrapers and SEO Tools.) Choosing a Browser took us to more tutorials for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, Ghost Browser, Smartproxy's own browser extensions, and others including FoxyProxy and SwitchyOmega. Overall, there is plenty to take in.

If you can't find what you need on the support site, you could turn to live chat on the website. That didn't help us very much: we posted a chat message, waited for a few minutes, the site said it would reply via email, instead, and we still hadn't received anything twelve hours later.

You could just send an email, instead, though, and when Smartproxy's Support did reply, its answers were helpful and told us precisely what we needed to know. A final option is that there is a Discord community option to solve your issue with some fellow user input.

Final verdict

Smartproxy isn't the most powerful proxy service, or the cheapest, and also lacks a free trial. However, its vast proxy network including mobile proxies, and handy library of management apps along with 24/7 help available via chat should deliver everything you need for most applications. 

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