DataImpulse Review
The DataImpulse proxy service is one service that sets itself apart from the others in the market with its dead cheap pricing. With only $1, you can get 1GB — how cheap can residential proxies be than this? Well, interestingly, it does have good reviews on many of the review platforms including TrustPilot.
As a proxy reviewer, this cheap pricing and good reviews caught my attention and I decided to try it out and provide you an honest review. Who knows, this might be the best option for those on a tight budget looking for proxies that work they can use for their next project.
Cheapest Residential Proxies on the Market
- There are 5 million IP addresses in its pool
- Location coverage is moderate, with geo-targeting support
- Support both rotating and sticky ports
- IPs are undetectable and real residential IPs
- Pricing is the cheapest out there
- Prompt customer service support
- Support both username and password authentication
- Multiple payment methods are supported
The DataImpulse service has its market defined — a market that requires cheap and affordable residential proxies and it meets their need perfectly. Based on its location coverage and pool size, this is not a service I will recommend for any mid-scale to large-scale project. But for small-scale projects, its 5 million IPs are enough to handle them. One thing you will come to like about the service is its support for both rotating and sticky port support.
This diverse usage makes it good for both automation such as web scraping and account management. Sticky ports should be used only when you need to maintain a session as in the case of account management. You should keep the session time shorter than 30 minutes but can go as long as 120 minutes.
You can choose to use IPs from specific countries but you need to be careful with this as geo-targeting when done as choosing an unpopular country will make the IP pool you have access to small which would affect the efficiency of IP rotation. Aside from being cheap, the service has a reputation for offering undetectable IPs that can be used to access all kinds of sites.
It supports both the HTTP(s) and SOCKS5 protocols and has a ready-to-assist customer support service. However, it does have its cons which range from having a small pool meant only for small-scale web scraping, among others. As we go deeper into the review, you will learn more about this service's pros and cons.
“Is DataImpulse worth it? Let’s dig deeper and discuss it further”
Expert Review & Guides
The DataImpulse Solution
The DataImpulse service is not meant for one use case. It is a general-purpose proxy network and usage can be adapted, depending on your specific use case. Below are some of the tasks you can use their residential proxies for.
SERP Scraping
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) hold valuable keywords, website links, and ranking data that are valuable to SEOs. If you are an SEO and need a cheap proxy network to power your keyword scraping or competitor rank monitoring system, then proxies from the DataImpulse service will do that for you.
I have used them in our performance test against Google, Bing, and Yandex and they weren’t discovered. You just need to make sure it sets IP rotation to be after every request and get the other things right such as rotating headers and setting random delays between requests.
It is important, however, to know that because of its small pool and limited location support, some locations scraping their geo-targeted SERPs will need to be more efficient when done using their proxies.
E-commerce Scraping
Scraping e-commerce sites such as Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, or even your local e-commerce is possible using their proxies. For most e-commerce stores, there are no locational restrictions to accessing their content and as such, you can utilize the whole pool and set IP rotation time to be random. Using this, you are able to scrape reviews and ratings, collect product information and details as well as monitor pricing for products you are intersected in automatically.
Ad Verification
If you are in the business of ad marketing and in different regions, you will need to verify how the ads and placed and appear in the multiple regions you work with. For ads that are geo-targeted, you can only view them for regions they are targeted at.
Using the geo-targeting feature of DataImpulse, you are able to view ads as they appear in multiple countries and verify whether they appear and behave as they should or not. If the country is not a popular country, you should speak to their support team and find out whether they have IPs from such a country before purchasing proxies from them.
General Web Scraping
While SEO scraping, e-commerce scraping, and ad verification are web scraping, they are special forms of web scraping for specific domains. Aside from them, you can also use DataImpulse proxies to scrape all other websites and targets.
This is possible due to the undetectable nature of their IPs, their support for geo-targeting and IP rotation, as well as their acceptable speed performance. For this to work, you need to find out the specific requirements in terms of location and IP rotation for your task and set it.
Web Automation and Botting
Another use case you can use their proxies for is botting. If you need to manage multiple accounts on a website and use the accounts for automation, as in the case of sneaker copping, and managing accounts on Runescape, Discord, and Telegram, then their proxies are suited for that.
For this, you need to use the session support and set a rotation period based on your requirements. For each account, you should generate a different proxy endpoint so the accounts won’t share the same IP address.
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How DataImpulse Residential Proxies Work
The secret sauce of the DataImpulse service and what makes its IPs undetectable is that it does not own the IPs in its pool. Regular Internet users add their IP to a P2P network and give consent for their device and its resources such as IP and bandwidth to be used as proxy endpoints and get either compensated financially or allowed to use a paid app for free. Currently, there are over 5 million of these devices in their pool.
When you send a web request to a website using its proxy, the request goes to its proxy server which then routes the request through the devices in its pool. The same path is followed backward. Because the request reached the target website through the device in the pool, it is the device’s IP address that is recorded as your IP address.
If you set the IP rotation to be after every request, it means your request will be routed through a new device every time, thereby making it look like you are sending your hundreds of thousands of requests from hundreds of thousands of devices.
It is this feature that makes it possible for you to scrape data at scale from popular websites without getting blocked as these sites do have anti-spam systems that track and block IPs that send too many requests.
While this high rotating capability works for web scraping and some form of automation, it does not work for account management and other session management use cases. For these, you will need to use session proxies that will maintain the session for a limited period of time.
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Pricing and Features
The DataImpulse service is a proxy solution built with affordability to the bare minimum in mind. If you are on a tight budget and need to use proxies that just work without all of the other fancy-to-have features, then the DataImpulse service is the provider for you.
The pricing is based on bandwidth and the starting price per GB is $1. This is the cheapest you will get in the market. However, you can’t purchase 1GB only. There is a minimum bandwidth commitment of 5GB which you must meet.
With $5, you get 5GB to use for your Internet market or web scraping tasks. Interestingly, this is not the cheapest it gets. If you purchase more bandwidth, there is a discount per price of GB as it can go as low as $0.8 per GB or even lower if you go for their custom plan for enterprise usage. One good thing you will also come to like is that their bandwidth never expires like how others do unless consumed.
In terms of payment methods, there are multiple payment methods for you ranging from PayPal, credit/debit cards, wire transfers, and even cryptocurrencies. There is a free trial offer and refund policy in place which is usually handled on a case basis.
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Features of DataImpulse Residential Proxy Network
Below are some of the key features of the service and why some of its users have stuck to it over the periods it has been existing.
Features of DataImpulse Residential Proxy
- Large enough proxy pool for small-scale web scraping and automation usage. The service has over 5 million IPs in its pool. I wouldn’t recommend this for large projects. But if you have a small to mid-scale project, this is a good value for the money considering how cheap it is.
- Not all sites can be accessed via their proxy network. The DataImpulse service places some restrictions on the sites you can access which inlaces all government websites, banking and financial services, Ticketswap service, and emailing services.
- Pricing is the cheapest in the market as you can get a minimum of 5GB for $5, putting the price per GB at $1. If you purchase more bandwidth, you the it even cheaper on a per GB basis.
- Extensive location support with countries from all of the continents. However, the distribution of IPs per country is skewed as Egypt has over 1.4 million IPs while the US has only over 400K IPs. You need to find the pool size per country if your required country is not popular and so, not in the list of countries publicly displayed.
- It does have a flexible IP rotation mechanism allowing you to choose between rotation after every request or get sticky IPs that will be maintained for a period of time.
- Even though the pricing is cheap, they do offer live chat support with helpful agents who resolve your issues and attend to your queries in real-time making it great for those that need good customer support.
- It renders pages the same as humans will in other to make things more natural and keep you in the crowd rather than do things bot-like that will get your activities detected and blocked.
- Both username/password and IP authentication are supported. The username and password authentication is straightforward. For the IP authentication, you will need to provide the IP address of the devices you will use it on. With this, there is no need for pricing username and password for authentication.
- Bandwidth never expires. This means you are not in a hurry to finish up your bandwidth as in the case with other providers. You can purchase higher plans to get a discount and then use it as you want.
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How to Use DataImpulse
The service is a paid service that requires payment for use. Below is the step-by-step guide on how to get the proxy credentials for usage.
Step 1: You need to register an account — go to the official website at www.dataimpulse.com and create an account. You need to verify the email you use in the registration process.
Step 2: Log into the user dashboard using your credentials and go to the deposit area — add the amount of money you want to add using one of the payment methods. Supported methods include cards, Paypal, crypto, and wire transfer.
Step 3: Go to the products tab choose the Residential Proxy option and click it. You will be taken to the interface to configure and get your proxy details.
Step 4: On the page, you can just use the credential provided or use the proxy configuration tool to choose geo-location (country), IP rotation setting and timing, as well as the protocol among others. You can also set the number of proxy endpoints you need and then save settings.
Step 5: With the above done, you can then copy the proxy credentials or download them as a TXT file.
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Our Proxy Speed Testing
Speed is an important factor when choosing a proxy to use and for some speed-critical applications, you can’t use some proxies before their performance is below the required benchmark. While the DataImpulse service is affordable and presents you with the cheapest pricing in the market, it flopped in terms of speed and performance.
First, after configuring their proxies in my browser, it takes seconds to load a page. Aside from this, I went ahead to carry out a speed test using the speedtest.net tool and it failed — I couldn’t carry out the test. I then went ahead to try the fast.com website, another speed testing tool. At first, it wasn’t working as I got the below.
After much trial, I was able to capture the below briefly before it failed again.
With this, you can tell there is a problem with their system. To put things into perspective, this has nothing to do with my ISP as I tried testing the speed of my Internet connection immediately without using any proxy and I got the below result.
From the above, you can see that my Internet connection is not the problem but the DataImpulse service has issues they have to fix.
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ISP Testing — Residential or Not?
With the speed test result not encouraging, I set out to check whether the IPs are truly residential proxies. In reality, though, I know this wouldn’t be an issue as it is residential proxies that do have performance problems like this. I use the IPINfo.io website to look up the IP assigned and its details. Below is the result obtained.
The ASN type is ISP which translates to Internet Service Provider (ISP). This basically means the IP address is residential and as such, the proxies offered are residential proxies and as such, wouldn’t be blocked by default by websites.
Our Verdict
We have gotten to the end of the DataImpulse review and if you read it completely, you can already tell where we stand. The service works and provides you with undetectable IPs. It rotates IPs for you automatically but also gives you control over the rotation as you can maintain the session for a limited period of time.
However, its biggest cons is in its performance speed as it is slow. If speed is not important to you, then this is recommended as the pricing is enticing and perfect for small proxy users. But if speed is required, this is not recommended.
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