Do you plan on buying proxies from Hydraproxy? Before doing that, you must learn about the performance associated with their proxy service. Below is our expert review of Hydraproxy.
The HydraProxy service is one of the residential proxy services meant for small proxy users. The website of this service is simple and the details on it are straight to the point but will you get value for your money? On this blog, the service has been on our radar for a while and we have done some level of testing in the past to ascertain how effective they are.
An Overview of Hydraproxy
This time around, we will be giving a full-fledged review of the Hydraproxy service to help our readers make a choice. Among some of the critical sections is this review is the performance test section where we test their residential proxies and present the test result to you.
The HydraProxy brand is a reputable one and can be put in the same class as Proxy-cheap, Asocks, Geonode, Froxy, and Proxyrack. However, it has gained more popularity than some of these providers and the success rate you also enjoy using it is also a good one, too.
The service is based in the US and subject to the rule of law there. From this provider, you can get residential proxies, mobile proxies, and mobile static proxies. As stated earlier, it is a small proxy service and as such, the pool size is small and pricing affordable and targeted to small proxy users too.
Parameters | Features |
IP Type | Residential IPs & Mobile IPs |
Priced Charged | Bandwidth |
Price Sample | $5 for 1GB |
Pool Of IPs | 5+ Million |
Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S), SOCKS |
IP Rotation |
|
Filtering/Targeting | Countries |
Authentication | Username/password |
Speed | Average |
Free Trial | No |
Refund Policy | 24 hours |
Support | Email + Live Chat + Telegram |
Jurisdiction Location | United States |
Proxy Types
The HydraProxy service offers both residential and mobile proxies with two types of mobile proxies. In this section, we will take a look at the proxies each of these including what they are meant for in this section.
Residential Proxies
The HyraProxy's most successful and popular product is its residential proxy service. This service features a pool with 5 million IP addresses sourced via P2P from over 100 countries across the globe. While the pool size might not be big enough for large-scale projects, it is perfectly large enough for small to mid-scale web scraping projects.
This service supports two rotation modes and each has the task it is meant for. The first rotating mode supported by HyraProxy is request-based rotation, popularly known as high rotating.
For this, you get a new IP assigned to you theoretically after every request. This rotation mode is the configuration you should use for your web scraping task and other forms of automation that do not need session management such as market research and ad verification. Its secret power is how it changes IPs after every request which helps you to avoid exceeding request limits and your requests look like they are from multiple devices.
The second mode is known as sticky IP sessions. For this, your IP is only changed after a specific period of time usually between a few minutes up to an hour. This is the setup you should use when you need to maintain sessions for account management. If you need to manage multiple accounts on either an e-commerce platform or social media, this is the setup you should use.
In terms of pricing, their residential proxies are some of the cheapest in the market with no minimum monetary requirement. The pricing is based on bandwidth and starts from $5 per GB. However, if you purchase more bandwidth, the cost per GB becomes cheaper and can go as low as $3 per GB.
US Mobile Proxies
The US mobile proxies only provide you with US mobile IP addresses and support geo-targeting for all of the 50 states of the USA. These proxies are rotating proxies just like the residential proxies discussed above. The only major difference with it is that the IP your requests are routed through our mobile IPs, giving you more trust and making you undetectable.
Also, this only supports time-based IP rotation, and the options are 5, 10, and 30 minutes. However, the rotation period you have access to depends on whether you go for their regular or premium plan. One thing you will come to like about this service is that you have the option to either choose to get IPs from just Wi-Fi, 4G & 5G mobile devices, or a combination of both — the choice is yours.
The mobile proxy pricing is not based on bandwidth, but based on port and it is flexible. You can purchase a port for just a day, 3 days, 7 days, and 30 days. The price for the regular for 30 days is $59.95 while that of the premium offer is $97.95. bandwidth usage is unlimited here. I recommend you use this only for social media operations such as social media automation and account management.
Mobile Static Proxies
Unlike in the case of their US mobile proxies, this one has support for more locations as you can choose from a list of over 100 countries. However, the major difference between this and their US mobile proxies is not in location support but in IP rotation. While the US mobile proxies are rotating proxies, these ones are static mobile proxies — that is, your IP address does not get changed.
This gives you a longer session duration and you can use it for maintaining a long session period without switching IP. Again, as mobile proxies, they should best be used for social media account management. They give you longer sessions compared to US mobile proxies but you lose the power of IP rotation here.
For Hydraproxy mobile static proxies, you only have the option to purchase a proxy for a day and a port is sold for $3 per day. This is quite different from the others in that long-time durations are supported. If you ask me, I will say there is absolutely no reason to do this except if it is done so they can switch your IP daily.
Residential Proxy Features
In the section above, I gave you an overview of the proxies offered by this section. From this section on, I will focus our on their residential proxies which are the major proxies the service offers.
Rotating and Sticky Sessions
The HydraProxy residential proxies are quite diverse in their application and that is because of its rotational and sticky session capabilities. The default setting is the request-based IP rotation where the network seeks to assign a different IP address to each of your requests. Things do not always work like this as you get some duplicate IPs assigned too — but theoretically, that is how it is supposed to be.
This high rotating capacity makes it perfect for web scraping as your target website can’t pin down your hundreds and thousands of requests to a single or a few pools of IPs. On the other hand, you can configure the proxy to use sticky sessions where an IP is maintained for a period of time before switching great option for account management and other session management tasks in general. The IP rotation time for sticky ports is 5, 10, and 30 minutes.
Affordable Pricing
The HydraProxy is a provider focused on providing proxy solutions to small businesses and developers. Its pricing also reflects its target market, especially its residential proxies. First, the pricing is based on bandwidth but there is no monetary commitment. It operates on a pay-as-you-go basis with the price per GB starting from $5. However, there is a discount depending on the amount of bandwidth you purchase.
If you are a small user, there is every chance you will need between 1 – 50GB and if that, you are placed in the $5 per GB class. Users that need more bandwidth enjoy discounts as it can go as low as $3 per GB for the agency plan and even lower to $2.5 per GB for enterprise customers. This affordable pricing, coupled with the lack of a minimum monetary commitment makes it the provider for small projects with a very limited budget.
Large Enough IP Pool Size
HydraProxy does have over 5 million IP addresses in its pool. This number when compared to the to the 72 million offered by Bright Data or even the 52 million and 55 million offered by Netnut and Smartproxy respectively makes it not competitive at all. However considering HydraProxy customers are mostly small proxy users or those looking for cheaper proxies to use, then this number is a sizeable number.
Based on the pool size, this service is recommended for small to mid-scale scraping project,s and for that, it does the work perfectly well. But the pool size is not the only good thing here, the distribution is also good as it has over 100 countries supported. However, you need to be mindful when you require geo-targeting as that is only efficient for a few countries as the service does not have many proxies in the other countries enough to support an efficient IP rotation.
Proxy List Generation Support
Most residential proxies are backconnect proxies and provide you with just one endpoint through which you access the whole pool. This is not a problem until your task requires multiple proxy endpoints and each is expected to have a different IP address. The HydraProxy service is one of the residential proxy providers that comes with a proxy list generator. With this, you can create as many proxy endpoints as you want and each will have its own IP address.
The good thing about this tool is that it does not require you to pay any additional means as you just get charged based on bandwidth as it is regularly done which makes it a great addition. When used correctly, you can even use it in the same web scraping project to power your multithreaded web scrapers and get more unique IPs.
Residential Proxy Performance
In this section of the review, I will discuss the performance results obtained while testing out the service. We carried out 3 tests which include success rate, response time, and IP duplicate test.
Proxy IP Geo Test
What are the countries supported and from which country is geo-targeting efficient? These are two questions with two different answers. There are countries HydraProxy has IPs from but doesn’t have enough IPs to support an efficient and effective IP rotation in the case of web scraping.
For some countries, it has enough IPs in hundreds of thousands that you can use to power even mid-scale scraping projects. This information is important to web scrapers looking to scrape geo-targeted content for a specific country.
The HydraProxy service supports over 100 countries cutting across all of the continents. However, I will be lying to you telling IP rotation will be efficient and effective for each of these countries. Interestingly, there are only 8 countries that have over 100K IPs in their pool with India having the largest pool with over 1.5 million IPs.
After India, the US comes second with a pool of over 1 million IPs. Germany has over 344K IPs while the UK has over 311 million. The other countries include Italy, Russia, France, and Canada having 205K, 159K, 158K, and 141K IPs in the pool respectively.
For the aforementioned countries including the US, you can be assured Hydraproxy has the number of IPs to power your small to mid-scale scraping projects. For the other proxies, I am not sure — but you can speak to their custom support. If I was you though, I would rather go to a provider that supports more countries such as Smartproxy and Bright Data. They will cost you more though.
Proxy Success Rate
An unspoken truth especially when web scraping is that not all of your requests will succeed — some will fail. And in some instances, the failure is not a result of your target server being down but can be attributed to your proxy infrastructure. So, you are better off sticking with a proxy service that can provide you a high success rate with minimal connection drops and blocks.
We needed to test the success rate to expect from HydraProxy and to do this, we tested their proxies against some of the popular web targets by sending 300 concurrent requests a good number of times. Below is the result we got.
The average success rate obtained is 86.1% which I will say is good for a small provider and at the price even though there is still some room for improvement. The worst performance was actually on Google products like Google Search and YouTube at an 82% success rate.
This is discouraging but when you consider over 300 concurrent requests were sent, you can tell except you want to work at that same rate, then HydraProxy will still work for Google and YouTube. The result shows a good success rate against Bing, social media platforms as well as e-commerce sites.
Response Time Test
How fast are the residential proxies from HydraProxy? The response time will partly provide an answer to this, especially in terms of how soon you should expect a response for every request sent. At first, 2 seconds does not seem to be any major waiting time from 1 second.
However, if you have 10K requests to scrape the data you need, it could be the difference between 2 hours and 4 hours. Where does HydraProxy stand in this regard? Below is a chart showing the response time obtained by measuring the response time of popular residential proxy services.
As you can see above, the average response time of HydraProxy is 1.25 seconds. If you haven’t used a residential proxy before, you will want to see this as really slow. But for those who have used residential proxies for web scraping, they can tell this is the average speed you can expect.
There are worse services that even have a response time of over 3 seconds. However, there are faster services such as Bright Data, Smartproxy, and the proxy for enterprise (Nimbleway).
Unique IP Test
The Unique IP test shows you how many percentage of IPs that will be assigned to your requests when IP rotation is enabled will be unique. Usually, the larger the size of a pool, the higher the unique IP rate.
But this is not always the case as some providers with large IP pool can perform poorly due to having a large customer base or as a result of a large chunk of their pool being offline. In the case of HydraProxy, the result is a good one as we recorded an IP duplicate rate of 23.13% after sending over 500K requests.
With a duplicate rate of 23.13%, you can tell this is not the best result as there are providers with about a 10% duplicate rate such as Bright Data. However, this rate is good enough for most web scraping projects and you wouldn’t exceed the request limits that will lead to blocks. However, let me give a bit of context here and a warning. The test was carried out without using geo-targeting or any parameter.
When you need to use the geo-targeting feature, your result will most likely be more than this especially the geo-location is not one of the popular geo-locations in the HydraProxy IP pool. For this reason, we recommend not to use geo-targeting except when it is absolutely necessary. Even in cases where it is necessary if the required location is not popular, I suggest you use one of the alternatives mentioned at the end of the article.
How to Use HydraProxy
HydraProxy has one of the most easy-to-use user dashboards in the market. It is so intuitive that new users wouldn’t even need a guide to use it. All you need to do is create an account and add funds to your wallet. It is from the added fund in the wallet that you purchase the proxies you need. Under the proxy network, you will see your proxy and a ‘Manage Access' button. It is by clicking this button you get your proxy details (proxy address, port, username, and password).
The default setting will choose IPs from random locations. You can choose the specific country you need IPs from for free. For the rotation option, you can choose between “random” which will change your IP after every request, or sticky which will maintain the session for a period of time before changing IP — rotation time can last up to one hour. HydraProxy also does not limit you to username and password authentication, you can use IP authentication too.
Customer Support
When it comes to HydraProxy, the team came readily prepared and will sort out your issues. First, unlike some other providers, HydraProxy has ready-to-help live chat support available. I tested their customer support and got a response in less than a minute. If you have to wait, you are given details on your number on the queue which gives a better user experience than some of its competitors.
But their live chat support is not the only avenue you can get support you can also contact them via email if there is no support team member online and you should get a response in under 5 hours. For those conversant with Telegram, the team is also active there.
Source of IPs
Rotating residential proxies do not own the IPs they route their client requests through. They use the devices of regular Internet users which are sourced via P2P networks and HydraProxy is not an exception. However, while some providers use unethical means to get their proxies, others use ethical means, either paying users to have their app run on their device or providing a free tool, and in turn the users allow access to their bandwidth and IP.
HydraProxy is not coming clean to say the actual source of their IPs and how they are gotten. For this reason, unlike other providers where we can tell the name of the apps and also verify whether they are ethical or not, we can’t do that for HydraProxy. So we can’t tell if they are an ethical provider and feel they owe their users an explanation of where they get IPs from.
Do We Recommend Hydraproxy
The HydraProxy does have its strengths and weaknesses. However, it is a tested and trusted provider of high-quality residential proxies. This provider is perfectly good for small to mid-scale scraping tasks and remains undetectable to most websites.
Because of its pool size of 5 million, it is not recommended for large-scale projects. If your tasks have a geo-location requirement, you are better off speaking to their support team if the country is not on the list of their top countries to know if they have enough IPs for you.
Alternatives to HydraProxy
The HydraProxy is a good provider no doubt. However, because of some of their shortcomings, there are instances where you will need an alternative. Below are some of the credible alternatives to the HydraProxy service we trust.
Proxy-Cheap
Recommended for its better performance at the same price. Proxy-cheap has the closest resemblance to HydraProxy both in pool size, features, and pricing. However, it does provide users performance compared to HydraProxy. It is the service for you if you want better performance but are not ready to pay more. However, there is no proxy list generator here.
Soax
Recommended for better geo-targeting support. HydraProxy supports only 100 countries with only a few of countries taking over 80% of the pool. Soax supports all countries in the world and does not only allow you to choose IPs from a specific country but also supports state and city-level targeting. It has one of the largest pools in the market which makes it a better performer in terms of unique IP rate and even success rate. It is faster too but costs a lot more.
Bright Data
Recommended for having a larger IP pool and extensive location coverage. Bright Data is our de facto residential proxy as it is the best performer so far — response time, success rate, unique IPs, you name it. It has a large pool and has one of the most extensive location support. This is a provider recommended for enterprise users but affordable enough for small users too. However, KYC is compulsory.
Smartproxy
This provider is a premium provider, offering service to both enterprise users as well as small proxy users. What makes this a credible alternative to HydraProxy is its advanced and better capabilities and features. It is one of the fastest and offers a better success rate and more unique IPs. It also supports more locations with geo-targeting for US states.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 8.6/10
8.6/10
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Proxy Network - 8.7/10
8.7/10
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Proxy Functions - 8.7/10
8.7/10
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Customer support - 9.2/10
9.2/10
Read other user reviews