Best Residential Proxies

Bright Data (Formerly Luminati)

Bright Data (aka Luminati) began in 2014, and their features and infrastructure are the envy of most of their competitors.

To lead with a strong claim as gathering any data from any website is a very bold one to make. That said, as the world leader with over 40 million residential IP addresses at their disposal, they certainly have the capability, and Bright Data does deliver.

Bright Data have an excellent dashboard to configure your service and 24/7 customer support should you need to call on their expertise. The company also provides its services to heavyweight Fortune 500 companies. So they must be doing something right to attract that class of customer.

In summary, Bright Data probably provides all you need and are the residential server provider of choice.

SmartProxy

SmartProxy is the darling of the proxy server world right now, despite only been active for a relatively short time. Their success is down to dedication in providing a high-quality service, great support and a competitive pricing model.

They also have a low entry point which makes them perfect for smaller business or those with lower scale scraping requirements.

Having over 40k US IP addresses available is a great asset, and far higher than you’d typically find with data centre providers. They also make these available at every price point, providing a highly anonymised service for all of their customers and providing all their IP’s works out better for them. The more proxy servers available to run through in a pool, the lower the chance of any detection and blocks.

In addition to that, they offer a limitless number of concurrent connections which makes them ideal for scraping vast volumes of data very quickly. There’s also the option of sticky sessions, which is excellent if you need to perform complex tasks requiring pagination or other requirements to hold an IP address.

SmartProxy’s dashboard is also a great bonus. Through that, you can define parameters, such as setting limits, choosing locations, dedicating traffic according to specific tasks, etc. all down to individual sub-users.

OxyLabs

Oxylabs are an Enterprise-level provider and perfect for those with large-scale requirements.

As such, they’ve positioned themselves as the leaders in providing business intelligence, market research, brand protection and ad verification. They also offer a very high standard of customer support to match their business credentials.

They currently have over 100 million residential IP addresses available. That’s second only to Bright Data, so there are no concerns over the number of IP addresses. Oxylabs also state that they cover every country and every city in the world. Very impressive!

GeoSurf

Established back in 2009 as BiScience, GeoSurf is one of the oldest proxy server providers out there. Still being in existence against the likes of Bright Data and Oxylabs proves their pedigree.

On offer are 2.5M residential addresses across 135 countries and over 1,700 cities. While that’s less than other competitors, it’s still a vast number and should be more than enough for everything except the most intensive web scraping. You can choose IP addresses at city and country level, but not by ASN.

A major plus point is the offer of unlimited connections which means you should be able to complete scrapes very quickly. The only barrier will be the amount of bandwidth you need, though you can get around that by upgrading to a larger plan.

GeoSurf also provides an API, with proxy rotations after each request or defined period. Handy if you need to hold onto an IP address.

NetNut

NetNut’s main selling point is its advanced DiViNetwork. Unlike their competitors, they don’t use a peer to peer (P2P) network, which is reliant on end-users using a device to make the IP address available.

Their network is comprised of IP addresses entirely controlled by NetNut sourced directly from over 100 ISPs worldwide. They can shape your traffic, load balance your queries and ensure a guaranteed quality of service.

As no other end-user devices are involved, your requests are very secure with no disconnections or interruptions. IP addresses are available 24/7 so maintaining a session is possible at any time. Dedicated IP pools are also available.

NetNut can manage 100’s of Gigabits per second of network traffic and are well used to handling a very high-speed network.

As you’d expect, a dashboard and API is available to check your statistics and usage in real-time.