It has just 200,000 rotating proxies, limited configuration options, and you can’t even country target the few US and EU locations available. This is nothing compared to the bigger players: Oxylabs, Smartproxy, or Bright Data.

But that’s not what StormProxies is about. It’s a home for small-time scrapers, sneaker cooks, and Instagram managers – hustlers on a budget that need a simple proxy service.  Not much more.

The pricing is also telling: the smallest rotating residential proxy plan starts from $1.4, with unlimited bandwidth. Add in a few well-placed ads, word-of-mouth recommendations, a lenient view toward ethics, and suddenly StormProxies’ popularity starts making sense.

The only real expectation here is for the actual proxies to work well.

Do they? Let’s find out.

PROS

• Unlimited bandwidth
• Cheap
• Easy to use
• Small proxy pool
• location targeting
• Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS、SOCKS5

CONS

• Average performance

KEY FEATURES

• Proxy types: Residential (rotating), datacenter (dedicated, shared)
• Locations: US, EU, World agency, global mix
• Reselling: Not available
• Support: By email
• Pricing: From $1.4 for 1 port ($14/port) for rotating proxies
• Payment options: Credit/debit card, PayPal, Amazon Pay
• Trial: 24hr refund for residential proxies

StormProxies Proxy Networks

StormProxies sells three kinds of proxies: dedicated datacenter proxies, a mix of rotating residential and Static house IP, and purely residential proxies. Let’s go through each type’s features and use cases.

Dedicated Datacenter Proxies

You can run up to 100 threads with each IP. They come from multiple subnets and IP classes, to protect you from blanket bans. Like many other datacenter IPs, these proxies use a fast 1Gbps connection and should have a good uptime.

Aside from the general plan, StormProxies sells datacenter IPs dedicated for particular use cases. For example, you can get them optimized for ticketing sites or social media. I wouldn’t advise using datacenter IPs for social media, though – this is so 2018.

The proxies run on the HTTP(S) protocol. Authorization is available using both credentials and IP whitelisting.

Backconnect Rotating Proxies

StormProxies offers around 200,000 rotating proxies that combine residential and datacenter IPs, depending on your gateway settings.  

These proxies have two biggest draws:

First, there are no bandwidth limits. Few other providers can offer this. Instead, you’ll be paying for concurrent threads the proxies can run.

Second, they rotate. You can choose from one of three backconnect gateway servers based on your IP rotation preferences:

Main gateway which mixes residential and datacenter IPs and rotates them every connection request. It should be used for web scraping, such as collecting SERP data from search engines. 3 minute gateway with a self-explanatory name. It contains datacenter IPs for account registration or regular browsing. 15 minute gateway, once again with datacenter IPs only. They’re tailored for use cases that require longer sessions (not sneaker or social media though – StormProxies has separate plans for those).

No matter which gateway you choose, the location options are the same: US, EU, US + EU, and worldwide. You can’t specify a particular country or city, which rules out most location-sensitive tasks (for example, getting localized Google data).

To keep the pool fresh, StormProxies replaces all the IPs with new ones every week.

The supported protocols here are HTTP(S), authorization methods – IP whitelisting. More expensive plans allow whitelisting more IP addresses, up to five. 

StormProxies Pricing

Without beating around the bush, StormProxies is cheap. In fact, it’s one of the cheapest proxy providers for small tasks, especially if you use a lot of bandwidth.

The pricing starts from $1.4 for the backconnect type (10 threads), $1.9 for the rotating residential proxies (1 port), and $10 for the dedicated IPs (5 proxies). The first two types give access to the full proxy network, no matter the plan.

StormProxies obviously targets small-time users. The largest plan for backconnect proxies costs $950 and gives you 1,500 threads to use. By buying more, you don’t really get extra features but rather more room to scale.

Some specialized plans, such as for ticketing and sneakers, cost the same amount as the general plan, which makes me wonder if they really use a separate pool. Other dedicated plans (like Instagram) are more expensive.

You can get a limited money-back guarantee, usually for a 24-hour period.

StormProxies Performance Tests

We tested StormProxies’rotating backconnect proxies for this year’s Proxy Market Research. This involved making more than 2 million connection requests over a period of three weeks. Our main target was a Cloudflare server in the US. Results with individual websites might differ, depending on your web scraper configuration and other factors.

We wanted to test the provider’s residential proxies but were fooled by the outdated documentation. So, we benchmarked its mixed residential and datacenter pool instead.

StormProxies doesn’t have a large IP pool. Over three weeks, we received a little over 84k unique IPs, or one every 20th successful request. Most of them came from residential devices, even though a substantial part (15%) used datacenter connections. The dominant protocol was IPv4, as usual with residential proxy providers.

Now, let’s look at the success rate: