GeoSurf

Basic introduction

GeoSurf is one of the veterans of the proxy server market. While pricey, its residential proxies are known for quality and location targeting options. Businesses often consider them in comparison to Oxylabs, Bright Data, and other top proxy vendors. 

But the market has been moving fast, especially in recent years. Does GeoSurf still have what it takes to win your business, and can it outmatch its premium competitors in 2022? Let’s find out.

Basic information

GeoSurf is an Israeli provider of proxies and web scraping tools.It can sell you access to a residential proxy network, datacenter and ISP proxies, a VPN, and an API to collect data from various websites.

Localization testing is still an important use case for GeoSurf, though the provider has expanded its reach to data collection, social media management, sneakers, and other proxy server uses. According to GeoSurf, anything goes, as long as it adheres to the Terms of Service.

The service is not for everyone, though. GeoSurf is very much a premium provider, both in pricing and business practices. The entry point is high, and you can’t even see how much some of the services cost – this requires contacting sales. And don’t even think about self-service.

GeoSurf Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are GeoSurf’s main service.The provider controls over 3.5 million monthly IPs. This isn’t much, but the proxies are known to be of good quality.What’s more, they’re peppered throughout many cities to serve GeoSurf’s location tester clients. Let’s have a closer look at what they offer.

Features

Geosurf’s residential proxies cover over 150 countries around the world.More impressive is the number of available cities: you can get proxies in about 1,700 locations.This makes the provider a good choice for geography-sensitive tasks.

Geosurf also has specialized proxies for Instagram and ad verification.Turns out, there’s nothing unique about them – they’re just like any other residential IP. 

The proxies are backconnect, and Geosurf has a built-in rotation API.It can rotate the proxies every request, after 1, 10, or 30 minutes.IP rotation allows sending many parallel requests at once and should be helpful for large-scale scraping.

Pricing

GeoSurf uses a subscription-based pricing model and charges for traffic expenditure.The plans aren’t rigid: you commit to spend a set amount of money at a fixed rate, and there’s nothing to stop you from using more.The rate improves once you reach a new checkpoint.

GeoSurf’s plans start from $300 for 20 GBs of data.Even though the entry point recently decreased (it used to be $450), it remains the highest on the market.The difference became even more apparent when premium competitors like Oxylabs and NetNut introduced low-cost plans starting from $15-20.

So, Geosurf naturally falls off if you have limited needs. And if you don’t? GeoSurf’s rates are still expensive – even more so than Oxylabs or NetNut, not to mention value leaders like Smartproxy.Moreover, you don’t get everything out of the box: features like city targeting cost extra.This makes the provider a pretty tough sell.

You won’t get a trial or a refund here.Instead, team GeoSurf is prepared to arrange a live demo for prospective clients.

Basic performance test

We last tested GeoSurf’s residential proxies for 2022 Proxy Market Research.

One million connection requests over 18 days using the global (unfiltered) gateway.300,000 (or 50,000) connection requests over 14 (or seven) days for each of seven high-value location gateways.1,000 connection requests to each of 10 popular websites.

Tests a) and b) used Cloudflare’s Trace tool that connects to the nearest Cloudflare data center.

GeoSurf didn’t have the largest proxy pool, especially compared to other premium providers like Oxylabs or Bright Data.Looking at our graph that measured unique IPs around the world, you could say it barely beat even cheap providers like IPRoyal.