The Vertagear PL4800 is a high-end gaming chair for those who spend a lot of time working from home or gaming. Thanks to the ContourMax Lumbar, the backrest adapts itself to your body to support a healthy posture with exceptional comfort. 

However, it’s important to note that the Vertagear PL4800 lands at the higher end of gaming chairs, with prices falling around the $600 / £500 / €600 / AUS$900 mark. If you can afford to spend this sort of money, then a Vertagear PL4800 is a good investment; with a sturdy and high-quality build, this gaming chair easily makes it into our best gaming chairs and most comfortable gaming chairs categories.

Vertagear PL4800 Gaming Chair: Price and Availability

While the price tag for the Vertagear PL4800 is relatively steep at $580 / £484 / €580 / AUS$895, you can currently find it on sale at Vertagears official website. However, with these sales comes less product availability. It’s also available through online retailers such as Dell and Amazon. Availability currently seems the strongest in the US and Australia with the UK lacking at the time of writing. 

Many third-party retailers and even Vertagear’s official store have dwindling stock, with some designs and colors unavailable. While this is hardly ideal, it doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to get your hands on one of these chairs; you may just need to wait a little longer to get the one you desire. 

Vertagear PL4800 Gaming Chair: Assembly

Setting up the Vertagear PL4800 was straightforward and enjoyable. I haven’t built many gaming chairs, so I was slightly apprehensive when I first saw an intimidatingly large and heavy box. However, my worries quickly dissipated after I opened the package and found the clearly labelled parts and informative instruction manual. 

Overall it took me 30 minutes to assemble the Vertagear PL4800, but you could quickly build this faster if you were in a rush. The instructions were clear and easy to follow without sounding condescending, and every part slotted easily into where it needed to be. 

The hardest part was finally placing the back of the chair onto the braces, but as long as you push the chair down slightly while screwing in the side bolts, you shouldn’t have any problem lining up the bolt holes. 

Vertagear PL4800 Gaming Chair: Design and features

While there isn’t a massive range of designs and colors for the Vertagear PL4800, the ones on offer are understated and sleek. I have a colorful and bright set-up, so I chose the black-and-white design. 

This monotone design looks cool without trying too hard, and it also means I can change the color scheme of my set-up without worrying about the chair sticking out like a sore thumb. 

The 4D armrests have also been a surprisingly welcome addition. This feature means you can move the armrest in four dimensions: height, sideways, front, and back. Before, I was just worried about my spine and lumbar support, but having these incredibly adjustable armrests has helped my posture and wrist support immensely, especially as I spend a lot of time at my desk for work and gaming.

Vertagear PL4800 Gaming Chair: Performance

The Vertagear PL4800 has set a pretty high bar for gaming chairs. Before getting this chair, I had switched through some mediocre options. My last chair didn’t even have a functioning backrest, so finally sitting on this high-quality seat was a welcome change. 

The ContourMax Lumbar support steals the show. Having great lower back support has improved my posture, and as someone who has had acute back pain and sits at a desk for many hours of the day, this feature is a great help. The headrest also helps support your entire spine, as I find myself sitting dead straight most of the time without any effort.

The seat itself is also surprisingly comfortable. As I said before, I spend a lot of my time sitting at a desk (possibly too much), so having a comfortable chair to sit on all day is a great asset. However, I will say  it has made every other chair I sit in now seem far more uncomfortable by comparison. 

Finally, I have to mention the fabric. While it’s great that this chair looks stylish, it’s even better that it’s functional. Vertagear uses a coffee-ground breathable cloth that neutralizes bacteria growth, is quick-drying, and is incredibly comfortable to sit on. All of these features make the Vertagear PL4800 function like a brilliant gaming chair that is the whole package. 

Should I buy the Vertagear PL4800

Buy if…  

Good lumbar support
You spend a lot of your time working or gaming at your desk and require high-quality lumbar support.

You want something that looks nice and functions well
Thanks to the muted colour scheme, the Vertagear PL4800 is an understated and stylish chair that can fit into any gaming set-up and even a home office. It also has substance with quick-drying and comfortable material that’ll immediately win you over. 

Don’t buy if…  

You don’t want to spend the big bucks
While the Vertagear PL4800 is a brilliant gaming chair, it hits the higher price range. You get what you pay for in the brilliant features; however, check out our best cheap gaming chairs for other chairs that tick your boxes at a lower price.  

• 4 things you need to know before buying a gaming chair

Sometimes it takes a disruptive entry into a segment to create some competition, offering both a better feature set at a better price. This newer entry into the proxy segment, Rampage Retail is a smaller company that has only been around since summer of 2020, based out of Miami, Florida. Its goal is to be fully transparent on its providers, and also the pricing, with proxies available at wholesale cost, in whatever quantity is needed. For those worried about the quality of a lower cost offering, Rampage Retail indicates that it has proxies that it resells for leading services, such as Oxylabs, Geosurf and Smartproxy.

Also of note, this company also offers servers for use on a subscription basis.

Sounds too good to be true? Let’s delve in deeper.

Rampage Retail: Features

Rampage Retail essentially buys the proxies from a number of leading proxy services, and then resells them. They can acquire the proxies at a lower rate, as they are able to buy a higher end plan for the lower rate, and then pass the savings along to its customers. The companies it buys from includes:

- Oxylabs

- Smartproxy

- SubnetWorks

- Packetstream

- Netnut

- Private Residential

- Geosurf

- Brightdata

With such a large pool or providers, Rampage Retail is able to provide worldwide coverage. They actually claim to have proxy coverage of every single country in the world. This gives them a pool of 170+ million proxies, which is more than just about everyone, but they are really leveraging the power of all the other proxies so that they can have more, without the constraints of hosting them on their own.

A concern is that with such a hodgepodge of providers, that the experience will suffer. Thankfully, Rampage Retail also indicates that it passes along to its subscribers the info from each of its proxy providers, Furthermore, it has instituted practices to bypass anti-bot measures that some websites put into place, and work against these proxies.

Rampage Retail: Pricing

Most proxy providers have a confusing array of different plans, based on the type of proxy (rotating, static, mobile, etc), the bandwidth for the month, and the number of proxies. This results in a choice of multiple plans, with payment based on paying monthly or with annual discounts for prepaying.

Not so much with Rampage Retail, that takes more of a generic approach. This kind of goes back to Henry Ford’s famous quote “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” Here, with Rampage Retail, there seriously is just a single choice of plan. The single choice of plan has a cost of £20.00 (about $25) each month. A Discord account is required for purchase.

We did not find any info for a free trial, or a free tier.

While the monthly price seems really good, realize that is just to join the club. Once you are a member of Rampage Retail via this monthly subscription cost, then there is a cost to use the proxy, by the GB. For example, Oxylabs goes for £6.90/GB, Smartproxy costs £6.9/GB, SubnetWorks comes in at £6.70/GB, and Geosurf a cost effective £3.25/GB. If we look at this pricing, it is a good deal, as we checked, and Smartproxy Pay as You Go plan comes in a $12.50 per gigabyte, and even the lowest volume of enterprise plan from this provider which forces you to purchase 100 GB for the month works out to a cost of $7/GB, so it is quite plausible that Rampage Retail is really passing along the cost savings to its subscribers.

Our annoyance comes that the way that this works could be explained better on the side. Truth be told, we really only started to understand this after joining the Discord server for Rampage Retail that had more detail, as the website just was not particularly clear. We prefer to not have to jump through so many hoops for just some basic pricing of any service.

Rampage Retail: Support

We looked, and found a lack of support options, as might be expected with a start up proxy option. For those that will need more hand holding, they will be better off with a fuller featured provider.

The self help support side is pretty simple to discuss, as there are literally no options. Therefore, there is not a blog, a webinar, an ebook, a forum, or any articles that we could find. Therefore, more novice users are likely to be disappointed with Rampage Retail.

Alternatively, the direct support is only marginally better. There is no phone number, nor fax. Clicking on the “Contact us,” button only opens up your email client to send an email. Reportedly, Rampage Retail can also be reached on its Discord server, or via Twitter. There is also no chat box option, nor is there a support portal for those that prefer that option.

In summary, a few direct support options are there, but they are probably not the ones that you would expect, making this feel a little ‘No frills.’

Rampage Retail: Final verdict

Rampage Retail offers a intriguing approach to accessing a proxy service. Users will like the extremely large database of proxies, the very cost effective approach, and the latest anti-bot measures. Alternatively, our concerns include the total lack of self help content, the limited direct support contact methods, and the lack of a free trial. Still, for users that want a cost effective solution to their proxy needs, while accessing the largest pool of proxies, Rampage Retail offers a service more than worth considering. 

We've rated the best business VPNs.

Webshare is a proxy service provider, based in Covina, California, which is in the San Fran Bay area. Rather than having a reliance on partners, all of its technology is fully developed in house by its team. Here, the emphasis is on cyber security, along with speed. In fact, these folks make the bold claim that it has the ‘Fastest proxies’- which we can’t quite verify nor refute. Webshare has a global proxy network that gets fully ‘Encrypted and protected,’ continuously. They are certainly a high volume provider that processes in excess of 250 billion data points each month (yes, that is billion with a ‘B’), and used by over 12,000 businesses. 

Webshare: Features

Webshare offers plenty of features to attract and satisfy its user base. This starts with support for both HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy, with availability for authentication or password authentication.

There is also an emphasis on anonymity here. Webshare works to have real time protection, as websites try to detect visitors, but this proxy attempts to stay ahead of this issue with up to date software. This includes protection against complex detection techniques, such as HTTP header inspection, TCP fingerprint proxy, port scan prevention, and DNS leak detection. Finally, they state that the data is entirely safe with them as private information does not get sold to a third party.

While some proxy providers have locations in just about every country, and also every city worldwide, Webshare falls short in simple numbers. It only covers over 40 countries, so some of the smaller countries do not have a proxy, such as Lichtenstein, and even some other major countries, such as Indonesia, have relatively few proxies, 19 at the time of this writing. Therefore, keep this in mind and Webshare may not be ideal for those that need truly a worldwide proxy presence.

An additional focus is on speed, and while most proxies state that they are the fastest, Webshare actually puts in some effort to validate that claim. This starts with a 99.97% uptime, an aggregate network of 100+ Gbps, and monitoring that goes on 24/7. Each proxy gets benchmarked every 5 minutes by an external service. The target is to keep it above 500 Mbps, and if below then there is a dispatch sent to a network team. Webshare also states that it uses both Speedtest.net and Fast.com, the latter owned by Netflix, to monitor its proxy speeds. On Fast.com, Webshare’s proxies run speeds at an impressive 800 Mbps to 950 Mbps. 

Webshare: Pricing

Webshare offers a number of different proxy products, depending on the type of proxy.

Residential proxy plans all have access to over 10 million IP’s, with a 99.7% uptime, and HTTP/

SOCKS5 endpoints start at $18.75/month for 1 GB on the low end. It has plenty of options to scale, such as 10 GB for $120/month, or 25 Gb for $270/month, topping out at 1 TB for $4800/month. We appreciate the multiple available plans, so that users can choose a plan that truly fits their needs from the eight available choices.

Not sure if this fits your needs? A standout of Webshare is the available free proxy plan. Sure, as would be expected, it is limited to just 10 free IPs, so it is hardly useful for a larger project. Still, it does not require a credit card, and it is a permanent plan, so not a time limited trial. We also like that it has a 99.97% uptime, along with all the features of a paid plan, making it useful for a full test drive, and as needs grow, an upgrade to a higher tier of plan. Just realize the limitation that there is not a free trial available of a higher tier plan, as some competitors offer.

Webshare: Support

Users of any of these proxy services, will sooner or later need some help, whether with a novice user to get up and going, or with a more complex need that is vexing even a veteran. Webshare has some options, both for self help, and direct contact, but we wish there were some more options. We also did not find a dedicated support page.

On the self help side, there is a Help Center. It is a series of articles, and it includes a search box. We like that it lists articles in a popular section, such as “Can I customize a plan?” or “How to upgrade to more proxies?” Overall, we would have liked to see more articles than the less than 50 that are there in total. We also did not find other content such as video content, webinars, a user forum, ebooks, whitepapers or a blog.

There is also a pathway for direct contact, but again, the options are thin. There is an email, and it does say to “Contact us anytime,” but there is no indication as to how fast an answer is expected, or if there are days or hours of operation. The other concern is that this email is the lone option, and there is no support portal, no chat, no fax, although technically there is a mailing address although we doubt most users will want to go that route.

Webshare: Final verdict

Webshare is an attractive proxy with clear benefits. It is easy to see the free tier, the high level of security, the emphasis on anonymity, the speeds of the proxies, and the choice of several plans. However, we are put off by the lack of support options, the prices on the plans, and also that competitors offer proxies in many more locations. Overall, the free proxy is worth trying, with all of the features, to see if this proxy meets your needs. 

We've listed the best CDN providers.