Discover Secure IPRoyal Proxy Services for Data Extraction

IPRoyal was founded in 2020 by Karolis Toleikis with the vision of providing businesses and individuals with secure and efficient access to online information. From its humble beginnings with just a few individuals, IPRoyal has quickly evolved into a dynamic, international company known for its innovative solutions and competitive pricing, which allows businesses of all sizes to benefit from its services.

IPRoyal proxy services are particularly appealing to businesses and professionals in industries such as market research, price monitoring, data scraping, web scraping, and digital marketing. Its customer base includes data scientists, developers, marketers, and businesses that rely on data for strategic decision-making and operational efficiencies.

We decided to evaluate IPRoyal’s proxy services to see what they offer, what you get for your money, and whether they live up to their claims. Here’s our review of IPRoyal’s proxy offerings.

IPRoyal Proxy Offerings

IPRoyal offers a variety of proxy services designed to cater to the needs of businesses and individuals who require reliable, secure, and scalable solutions for web data extraction, anonymity, and online operations. Below is a detailed breakdown of IPRoyal’s proxy types:

1. Datacenter Proxies

A datacenter proxy is a gateway that acts as an intermediary between a device and a website, allowing users to access the internet through a temporary IP address from a data center. Datacenter proxies are perfect for high-speed scraping and large-scale requests but are more susceptible to blocks.

IPRoyal’s datacenter proxies promise 99.9% uptime, and unlimited traffic. They are ideal for scenarios that require high performance and stable connectivity, such as collecting e-commerce pricing data in real time and scraping social network data.

2. Residential Proxies

A residential proxy is a server that acts as an intermediary between a user and a website, using a real IP address assigned to a real person by their internet service provider (ISP). Residential proxies excel in maintaining anonymity and bypassing geo-restrictions, though they may be slower than datacenter proxies.

IPRoyal currently offers over 32 million Residential proxies in over 195 countries. These proxies can be used in scraping public web data and ad verification. It comes with unlimited simultaneous sessions, rotating and sticky session options, ensuring seamless and uninterrupted access.

IPRoyal also provides a static residential proxy service, offering a consistent IP address from a residential location, along with a unique type of residential proxy called residential sneaker proxies, which are especially popular among sneaker enthusiasts. Sneaker proxies help people buy sneakers online by masking their IP address and location, which can increase their chances of purchasing limited-edition or exclusive sneakers.

3. Enterprise Proxies

An enterprise proxy is a server that acts as an intermediary between a device and the internet for large organizations and businesses. IPRoyal’s enterprise proxies promise 99.9% uptime and a vast pool of over 34 million proxies, providing the flexibility and scalability needed for enterprise-level operations. These proxies support a range of business applications, including web scraping, price monitoring, and cybersecurity.

4. Mobile Proxies

A mobile proxy is a server that uses a mobile device’s IP address to connect to the internet, masking the user’s actual IP address. IPRoyal Mobile proxies leverage real mobile devices across over 2.5 million IPs, providing unique advantages in terms of mobility and geo-targeting.

It promises support for 5G, 4G, 3G, LTE, unlimited bandwidth, instant IP changes, and auto-rotation options. They are particularly effective for managing multiple accounts, accessing content from mobile networks, ad verification and social media management.

5. ISP Proxies

An ISP proxy is a server that’s hosted in a data center by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and uses IP addresses from the ISP. IPRoyal promises 500K+ ethically-sourced unique IPs from 31+ countries. These proxies are hosted in data centers, making it appear as if the traffic is coming from a home, business or real ISPs, providing the benefits of high-speed performance and a high trust score.

In other words, IPRoyal ISP proxies strike a balance between speed and anonymity, making them ideal for scenarios requiring reliability scraping at scale such as extracting stock market data or scraping the web for mentions of your brand.

Ethical Use Cases of IPRoyal Proxies

IPRoyal proxies support transparency in digital advertising, help businesses safeguard their brand reputation, and enable secure communication through email protection. IPRoyal also facilitates competitor analysis, price monitoring, and website testing, allowing businesses to collect critical data while ensuring compliance with ethical standards and avoiding underhanded tactics.

In addition to these business applications, IPRoyal proxies also support social media management, travel fare aggregation, stock market data collection, and review monitoring, all of which contribute to enhanced customer engagement and informed decision-making. The service provides a secure means of bypassing geographical restrictions to access blocked content, improving user experiences, and supporting SEO practices. By ensuring ethical use in these areas, IPRoyal empowers businesses and individuals to engage in digital activities while respecting privacy laws and website terms of service.

Performance and Speed: Is IPRoyal Suitable for Your Use Case?

When using IPRoyal, understanding how they impact your internet experience is essential for ensuring they meet your needs, especially when performance and speed are key considerations. Whether you’re using proxies for web scraping, price monitoring, or social media management, or simply for anonymity, it’s important to gauge their effect on your internet connection.

Upload, Download, and Latency: Based on the tests we conducted, we’ve broken down the key elements of performance as follows:

• Upload Speed: Indicates how quickly you can send data to the internet. While upload speeds are crucial for sending emails, posting on social media, and updating cloud services.
• Download Speed: Measures how quickly data is received from the internet. This is particularly significant for streaming high-quality video, loading web pages, and downloading large files.
• Latency: Measures the time it takes for data to travel between your device and the server, typically measured in milliseconds (ms). For most internet activities, a ping below 100ms is acceptable, but for real-time applications like gaming, a higher ping can cause lag and affect performance.

For social media management, sending emails, and updating cloud services, upload speed is important. IPRoyal proxies showed virtually no effect on upload speed. This is good news if your main use case involves sending data, or other tasks requiring fast upload capabilities, as this won’t be a significant issue.

If your main use case for IPRoyal is web scraping or price monitoring, where downloading large amounts of data is crucial, be aware that download speed reduction can significantly affect efficiency. While IPRoyal’s proxies are capable of performing these tasks, you may experience slower data retrieval times when using IPRoyal proxies. For example, if you require fast data extraction or need real-time information, you may need to consider the performance impact and optimize your scraping tasks accordingly (e.g., by reducing the frequency or volume of data requests)).

IPRoyal proxies are not ideal for gaming due to the high latency results during testing. If you’re looking to use proxies for activities like accessing geo-restricted content or protecting your identity while gaming, you may encounter lag that could make the gaming experience unpleasant or even unplayable. If your goal is simply to maintain privacy and secure browsing, IPRoyal’s proxies perform well in terms of upload speed.

Uptime, Proxy Rotation, and IP Blocks: IPRoyal promises a 99.9% uptime for all of its proxies. This high uptime is crucial for businesses and developers relying on IPRoyal’s proxies for web scraping, data monitoring, and automated processes.

One of the main challenges in web scraping and automation is dealing with IP blocks, rate-limiting, and CAPTCHA challenges. To mitigate this issue, IPRoyal offers both rotating and sticky sessions to ensure users can effectively manage IP blocks and avoid detection.

With rotating proxies, IPRoyal automatically switches IP addresses after each request or after a specified time interval. For tasks requiring continuous sessions with a fixed IP (e.g., login sessions), IPRoyal also supports sticky sessions, allowing users to maintain the same IP address for a set period or until they choose to change it.

Ease of Use and Integration

One of the most critical factors when selecting a proxy provider is how easy it is to use and integrate the service into your existing workflows. This allows businesses and individuals alike to quickly adopt the service without dealing with steep learning curves or complicated setups. Here’s what I found:

1. User Interface

We had no difficulties configuring and using the IPRoyal proxy services. Its user interface (UI) is intuitive and easy to navigate, which significantly lowers the barrier to entry for new users. Once we were provided with the proxy server address, username, and password, we used that information to manually set up our computer and route web traffic through IPRoyal’s network.

• Dashboard: The central dashboard provides users with a clean overview of their proxy usage, including metrics like session details, account balance, bandwidth consumption, and active proxies. This helps users stay informed about their usage patterns and make adjustments as needed.
• Account Management: The account setup process is simple and straightforward for us. From our assessment, new users can easily sign up on the IPRoyal website and access their dashboard without the need for complicated setups. From there, they can manage their proxies, view pricing plans, and adjust their settings.
• Proxy Pool Selection: IPRoyal offers multiple proxy types (residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP, and enterprise proxies), and the UI allows you to easily select and configure the type of proxy that best suits your needs.

2. Documentation and Support

IPRoyal provides comprehensive documentation and customer support to ensure that users can easily integrate and troubleshoot their proxy service.

• Tutorials and Guides: The website features helpful tutorials and quick-start guides that cover basic to advanced proxy setup, integration, and best practices for tasks such as web scraping, ad verification, and social media management.
• 24/7 Customer Support: IPRoyal’s dedicated customer support team is available around the clock via help center,  live chat and email to assist with any questions or issues. Whether it’s helping with integration or troubleshooting technical problems, the support team ensures minimal disruption to your business operations.

3. API Integration

IPRoyal provides API support that users and developers can leverage to integrate proxy services into their applications. Its built-in proxy generator automatically generates codes that can be used with cURL commands. It also supports integration with Python, PHP, and Node.js. We tried using the generated codes for cURL (for Windows command line tool)  and Python, and it worked perfectly. The setup process for integrating with these tools is pretty simple and straightforward.

Pricing and Plans

IPRoyal adheres to the typical pricing structure for proxy services, offering a flexible and transparent pricing structure tailored to meet the needs of primarily individual users and SMBs; but it also targets large organizations and enterprises. Residential proxies are priced at $1.75 per GB, making them an affordable option for users seeking high anonymity. ISP proxies are available for $2.40 per proxy, providing a reliable and stable option for users requiring a mix of residential IP benefits with dedicated infrastructure.

Datacenter proxies are priced at $1.39 per proxy, offering a high-performance solution for large-scale scraping tasks. For mobile applications, IPRoyal provides Mobile proxies starting at $117 per month, ideal for mobile browsing or app testing. Additionally, enterprise-level users can access custom pricing tailored to their high-volume or specialized requirements.

All IPRoyal plans include essential features like geo-targeting and the ability to add extra IP addresses, with no hidden fees for these services. The pricing model scales with usage, offering a predictable and affordable option for both small and large projects. While IPRoyal stands out for its reasonably priced and flexible service, the lack of clarity on volume discounts, enterprise pricing, and geo-targeting costs, may pose challenges for some potential customers.

Your Security and Privacy With IPRoyal

IPRoyal provides security and anonymity through features such as IP Rotation, Sticky IPs, advanced masking techniques (like header masking and geo-location spoofing), and encryption protocols while promoting ethical use of its services. It offers anonymity by masking your actual location and ensuring that your real IP address is never exposed. It uses HTTPS (for securing your communication) and SOCKS5 protocols (for concealing your identity).

Notwithstanding, it’s important to note that proxies, including IPRoyal, typically do not offer the same advanced security features as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), such as a kill switch or split tunneling. Proxies are more basic tools for masking your IP without these advanced security or routing features.

It’s also important to note that IPRoyal operates in various locations, including the UAE, USA, Lithuania, and a few other regions. The company does not clearly specify its headquarters location on its website. This lack of transparency regarding the headquarters is a notable concern, particularly when it comes to privacy and regulatory matters.

However, its privacy policy states that it is officially incorporated in the UAE, and its Privacy Policy is prepared in accordance with the UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data Protection. This means that privacy practices are governed by UAE law, which may offer different levels of protection and user rights compared to the data privacy laws of other regions. This may influence how their personal information is collected, stored, and potentially accessed by authorities.

Users should therefore be aware of IPRoyal’s data logging practices. Its privacy policy explicitly states that log data, including IP addresses, account credentials, and usage statistics, are collected during interactions with the system. The privacy policy also indicates that personal data may be shared with government agencies, law enforcement, and regulatory authorities when legally mandated.

IPRoyal’s Stance on Compliance, Ethical Use, and Terms of Service

IPRoyal takes the compliance of its services with applicable laws, privacy regulations, and its terms of service seriously. The company emphasizes the importance of ethical and legitimate usage of proxies and scraping tools, ensuring that they are used transparently and within the boundaries of applicable legal and moral standards. Here’s an overview of IPRoyal’s commitment to ethical conduct and compliance with its terms of service:

1. Commitment to Legal Use and Compliance: IPRoyal Acceptable Use Policy explicitly outlines the permissible uses of its services under its Terms of Service. The company grants access to its proxies and services for research, personal, and legitimate commercial purposes only. These services are not intended for scraping non-public or restricted data, bypassing CAPTCHAs, or violating website terms of service.
2. Suspension and Removal of Access: In instances where a client breaches the terms of service, such as using proxies for illegal activities or non-ethical scraping, IPRoyal states that it reserves the right to suspend or terminate their account. The company may also take legal action if a breach of law is suspected. Suspension or removal of service can occur without prior notice, and clients may not be entitled to any refund if their account is deactivated due to violations.
3. Proactive Measures to Prevent Violations: IPRoyal is proactive in ensuring that its clients comply with applicable laws and regulations. If a user violates the terms of service, IPRoyal will notify them with an explanation and give them the opportunity to rectify the violation. The company may also report illegal activity to law enforcement authorities and permanently ban violators. This ensures that IPRoyal’s services are only used for ethical purposes that align with legal and moral standards.
4. IP Address Sourcing: Unlike some proxy services that acquire IPs through questionable means, IPRoyal obtains them through its Pawns.app, which sources IPs from real residential and mobile accounts. Individuals can sign up to contribute their ISPs to IPRoyal’s network and are compensated for doing so. This transparency in the process makes us feel more comfortable using IPRoyal, as everyone who shares an IP is fully aware of the arrangement.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

IPRoyal offers a robust and diverse proxy service with multiple types of proxies to cater to a variety of legitimate business needs. Whether it’s for market research, SEO tasks, ad verification, or protecting privacy, the service facilitates ethical proxy use to help businesses access valuable data and operate efficiently in a digital world. IPRoyal emphasizes its commitment to compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, and privacy standards. The company also takes a firm stance on ensuring that users adhere to its terms of service, avoid scraping restricted or non-public data, and refrain from bypassing CAPTCHAs or violating website terms.

The service provides users with powerful tools for legitimate purposes like price tracking, research, and online security. It is essential to remember that scraping non-public data or engaging in activities that violate website terms of service can carry significant legal risks. IPRoyal upholds the principle of ethical proxy usage and encourages users to engage in practices that are transparent, lawful, and respectful of the rights of others. When proxies and scraping tools are used within the boundaries of the law and with clear ethical intentions, they provide valuable business advantages without compromising privacy or legal integrity.