Asocks Review
The Asocks service prides itself as ‘the most stable residential proxy network’ in the market. This is a bold statement to make and as a proxy reviewer, it is my duty to find out whether they are as stable as they claim or whether their proxies even meet your requirement.
I will review the Asocks residential proxies, giving you all of the details you need to make an informed purchase decision. As with other providers, it does have its pros and cons and can be put in the class of the cheapest proxies that work.
Cheapest Residential Proxies in the Market
- Over 7 million IP addresses in the pool
- Extensive location support with over 150 countries
- Maintain the same price for both mobile and residential proxies
- Free trial offered to new customers
- Offer both rotating and sticky sessions for diverse usage
- The user dashboard is intuitive and easy to use
- No KYC is required
The Asocks service is a proxy provider based in the US. This proxy service offers both residential and mobile proxies. The service stands out for offering the cheapest residential proxy network as you need just $3 per GB to get started. But that is not all, the pricing for both its residential proxy and mobile proxies is the same.
According to information on its page, it has a pool of 7 million sourced from over 150 countries. The major use case for their proxies is web scraping. While the name of the service has ‘socks’ in it, the SOCKS5 protocol is not the only protocol supported, there is also support for the HTTP protocol.
I will say this provider is a small provider, looking at the size of its pool, its pricing, and the results obtained while carrying out the performance test. It is positioned to cater to small proxy users, looking for proxies to start using without going through the stress of doing KYC or breaking the bank.
However, it is not the provider for mid to large proxy users looking for a performant beast to work with. As you will come to find out later, it does have the area it shines and the areas that can be termed as weaknesses.
“Is Asocks worth it? Let’s dig deeper and discuss it further”
Expert Review & Guides
The Asocks Solution
The Asocks service offers residential proxies and mobile proxies —another form of residential proxy. Residential proxies are built for certain tasks and are not good for others. In this section, I will focus on the best tasks you should use in their residential proxies, considering their unique strengths and weaknesses.
E-Commerce Scraping
One of the major use cases of their proxies is e-commerce scraping. We have tested their proxies and have proven to be effective at scraping Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Walmart, Adidas, Nike, and even Booking. You can use their proxies to power your price monitoring and comparison tool.
It is also great for product detail scraping as well as customer review and rating scraping. It IP rotating capability that changes IP after every request, give it this power. However, because it has a pool of 7 million IPs, you shouldn’t use this for large projects.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Scraping
Another use case you can put their proxies to is scraping Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for keyword and ranking data. If you are into SEO, you will know how valuable the SERPs are, especially for Google. It contains valuable keywords and related questions that you will want to integrate into your content.
You can use their proxies to scrape these as they are undetectable to Google and Bing. It also has support for over 150 locations, making it possible for you to scrape Google’s local SERPs.
Social Media Scraping and Marketing
Whether you want to monitor conversations on social media or scrape the content there, the Asocks proxies are here for you. Their IPs are undetectable to most social media platforms. With its rotating network, you can get a new IP after every request, hiding the fact that your thousands of requests originate from the same device.
If you need to manage multiple accounts on social media for a limited period of time, there is support for session proxies suitable for that too. However, the session support is not as effective as their rotating support, making them better suited for scraping.
Other Use Cases
Social media, e-commerce, and SEO are not the only use cases to which you can put their proxies to use. There are many other use cases ranging from ad verification, unblocking content you are blocked from accessing, as well as managing multiple accounts for a limited period of time.
It can also used for load testing where you use it to send a huge traffic to a website and see how it will react in terms of performance. While this is used for testing the amount of traffic a web server can handle, it is also used by websites expecting a surge in traffic and as such, want to see how their site will react in such a situation.
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How Asocks Residential Proxies Work
The Asocks operates a residential pool-based system. Unlike in the case of datacenter proxies where the proxies are hosted on their server, giving you a one-hop connection, which offers better performance, their residential proxy system is different. For this, there is a pool of IP addresses owned by third-party users which they do not have control over. For this reason, they operate based on a rotating proxy basis — using the IPs available only.
You are given a proxy endpoint consisting of a proxy address and port. Using this, you are given access to the pool. When you send a web request, the request goes to their network where they choose from the list of available IPs in their pool and route your requests to its destination via this IP and its device.
The response follows the same path but in a reversed manner. Because the request hits the destination server from the IP they route your request through, it is seen as if that is your real IP, thereby masking your real IP address.
Because it is a rotating service, for each request you send, you get a new IP address. The service is paid and as such, needs you to authenticate in other to make use of it. For authentication, the Asocks service supports username/password authentication and IP authentication.
For IP authentication, all you need is to whitelist your device’s IP address and that device will access your proxies without the need to use a username and password for authentication.
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Pricing and Features
Pricing is an important feature you will need to take a look at since you can end up paying more for less. Proxy services spend a bulk of their budget on marketing and as such, expensive is not always better. However, there is still a correlation between price and quality of proxy offerings.
The Asocks service has its product positioning right — which is catering to small proxy users. And for this reason, it is not one of the services you will have to spend a lot to get started. First, the pricing is based on bandwidth or what some will want to call traffic.
It operates strictly on the pay-as-you-go model where there is no commitment and you only get to pay for the bandwidth you use. The price per GB is $3 and it does not matter whether you need to purchase 1GB or 994GB — the price is the same. There is a free trial support provided to new users to test out the service before becoming paid customers.
Interestingly, there is a refund policy in place, but it is more in their favor than it is in yours. So, you are better off using their free trial before purchasing a plan.
This straightforward pricing model makes it affordable and accessible to small providers. One thing you will come to like about this service is that its mobile proxies have the same pricing as its residential proxies. With this kind of setup, your focus is more on the utility as the best determinant of the proxy to choose rather than the pricing.
Features of Asocks
Below are some of the key features of the Asocks service you need to know.
- There are over 7 million IPs in the pool of this provider. It didn’t state how many are residential and how many are mobile. Generally, I wouldn’t recommend you use this for large tasks as the IP duplicate rate during IP rotation is high when you send hundreds of thousands of requests. But for small-scale tasks in the tens of thousands, it is sizeable and equal to the task.
- The service does have good location support as there are over 150 countries captured in their pool and you can use the geo-targeting option to get IPs from a specific country. However, it is important you know that the countries didn’t contribute an equal amount of IPs and as such, aside from the top countries, the number of IPs from the other countries can be so small that IP rotation won’t be efficient and as such, you can’t scrape geo-targeted content from that country.
- Both the HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols are supported by this service. This gives it a diverse usage as you can use it together with tools that require you to provide either HTTP proxies or SOCKS5 proxies. You should take note of the ports and make sure you are configuring the right credentials.
- Customer support is swift if you use their telegram channel. On its web page, look out for the Telegram icon on the bottom right corner of the page and click. At the time I used this feature, it was fast and the agents were quite helpful.
- Pricing is the cheapest you can get in the market for proxies that work. The price per GB is $3 monthly and there is no minimum commitment, thereby operating on a strict pay-as-you-go model.
- Acceptable performance especially for small scraping purposes as the speed is fast enough even know it is not the fastest out there. The scraping success rate is also good but you will need to set up a retry mechanism in place to retry the failed requests for your tool to be more robust and resilient.
- The proxies offered are high-rotating proxies that switch IPs after every request. There is also support for session proxies which are best for maintaining IP for a limited period of time, good for account management.
- The user interface is intuitive and built to be user friendly. The service generally is easy to use and does not require you do to a KYC like other providers. You can get started with the service in less than 5 minutes.
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How to Use Asocks Proxies
The Asocks proxy service is one of the easy-to-use proxies out there. This is because it is minimalistic and its user interface is beginner friendly. Follow the steps below to learn how to make use of their proxies for your tasks.
Step 1: Visit the official website of Asocks and create an account. While you can create an account the number way, you can also create an account by using your Google account.
Step 2: Verify your account email and add funds to your account. There are multiple payment methods offered. You can either make a payment using your credit/debit card or pay using cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.
Step 3: Go to the proxy tab and look out for “Generate Proxy Port”
Step 4: For the type of proxies, you can either select the residential, mobile, or corporate option. There is also support to choose all, thereby getting IPs assigned to you from any of the pools.
Step 5: If you have the need to use the geo-targeting option, you can choose the country of your choice. There is also support for state and city-level targeting. However, unless necessary, I will advise you not to use these options as it reduces the number of IPs available to you.
Step 6: Give the setup a name and enter the number of proxies you want to generate then click on the “Create IP:Port” button.
Our Speed Testing
As residential proxies, you shouldn’t expect super fast proxies from this provider as speed is not one of the strengths of residential proxies. However, this does not mean you should end up with the slowest as there are some of them that can slow your project really well. Unlike our conventional speed testing method, I use a custom script to test the performance of their proxies in terms of speed.
I sent about 300 concurrent requests multiple times against multiple web targets. The result is interesting. First, the response time measured was 1.31 seconds. This is not the fastest you can get and definitely not the slowest either. This can be said to be the average response time.
In terms of download speed, I recorded a download speed of 24.84 Mbps. At first, this does not look like it is fast when you compare it with your Internet speed without using proxies. However, for residential proxies, this is more than average. The average download speed of residential proxies is around 20 Mbps and anything more than this is regarded as fast.
Our Verdict
The Asocks proxies offer residential and mobile proxies that work — there is no doubt about that. However, it is not the best for all use cases as it has both pros and cons. It offers residential proxies at its cheapest in the market with the pay-as-you-go model which makes it affordable. This together with its rotating capacity and extensive location support makes it perfect for small-scale web scraping and automation.
The actual region or country pool size is not made known and as such, aside from the US, UK, Russia, Germany, and a few other countries, I will advise against using the geo-targeting support. For large-scale projects, I will advise against using their proxies as they are not built for that and you could run into performance problems quickly.
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