Kalle Hallden
Do you wish to utilize the services of Shifter Proxy but want to know more about it before investing your resources and funds? This article provides you with a detailed review of Shifter Proxy to help you know if it is legit or a scam.
In this article, I will provide a purely unbiased review of Shifter Proxy and the residential proxies they offer.
The name “Shifter Proxy” has been bandied around a lot recently. It has been called both one of the top home proxy providers and one of the worst by users.
I performed my own digging and testing of Shifter Proxy’s scraping efficiency and internet connection speed to clarify the air and provide you with an objective assessment.
In this review, I’ll talk about my findings. First, however, let’s define Shifter Proxy in order to know what to expect from the subsequent review.
What is Sifter Proxy?
When it comes to proxy services, Shifter has been around for quite some time. Since its introduction in 2012, it has grown to establish itself as one of the industry’s leading proxy service providers.
It stands out from the competition with one of the biggest proxy networks available and its own distinctive capabilities.
When compared to other residential proxy service providers, Shifter backconnect proxies stand out because they do not limit your internet access based on your bandwidth usage, unlike most of its competitors.
Shifter Specification and Features
| Parameter
|
Feature
|
| Type of Internet Protocol
|
Datacenter and Residential
|
| Price Charged
|
Port (10 ports cost 125 USD per month)
|
| IP Pool Size
|
More than 26 million
|
|
Proxy Protocol
|
Socks5 and HTTP(S) |
| Speed
|
Average
|
| Free Trial
|
No
|
| Money-back Guarantee
|
YES (3 days)
|
Pros of Shifter Proxy
1. Easy User Interface
Shifter’s dashboard is easy. It isn’t the most complicated on the market, but it’s still a step above the average.
In other words, you can get right in since it is not complicated.
With Shifter, you can simplify authentication by having the Internet Protocol (IP) address of your device whitelisted
Because of this, you won’t have to worry about the strain that comes with using a login and password.
2. Provides Return Policy
There is no mention of a return policy, for better or worse, in any of the other evaluations of competing proxies. But we’ve gone ahead and included it anyway.
This is due to the fact that, in contrast to other proxies, Shifter has gotten a lot of criticism from its customers, and as a result, most people are only going to utilize it if they are guaranteed a full refund if the proxies don’t work as advertised. To facilitate this, Shifter offers a 3-day money-back guarantee.
Nevertheless, due to increasing misuse of their free trials by spammers, they are no longer offered, and you will need to pay if you want to make use of them.
3. Boasts a sizable IP address range and geographic reach
It entered the market in 2012 under the name reverseproxies.com, but in 2014 rebranded itself as a more comprehensive service.
In the years since its inception, it has become one of the industry’s preeminent proxy networks, having access to a pool of more than 26 million private IP addresses.
There are only two known providers that offer greater proxies than Shifter: Brightdata, with an IP pool size of more than seventy-two million, plus Smartproxy, with an IP pool size of more than forty million.
With this number of IPs, it moves up to third place on this list.
4. Limitless Bandwidth plus Good Pricing
In addition to its large IP pool, Shifter’s competitive price is a major selling feature. Proxies used in homes are often measured.
They charge you more money after your allotted data has been used up since they sell their services in bandwidth.
Also, Shifter charges per port instead of per bandwidth, so once you’ve joined their service, you’ll have access to an infinite data transfer rate on the internet.
It also provides limitless data transfer rates.
They provide unmetered proxies that are likewise very reasonably priced.
Their entry-level package has ten ports and costs 129.99 USD yearly.
These ten can be used independently to gain access to a home network for 5 minutes before the IP address is switched.
This implies that Shifter’s residential proxies only allow for five-minute sessions with session control enabled.
Cons of Shifter Proxy
1. Poor Customer Support System
Even in this respect, Shifter fails. Since it has been around for a long time, it seems like it would be competing with the best of the best in customer service.
As it turns out, though, Shifter doesn’t put much effort into customer care and appears more concerned with expanding its business and enhancing its service.
It’s not that I don’t know they have a FAQ page; I just know it’s quite long. But unfortunately, that’s not sufficient.
Their email assistance is very sluggish, and they don’t even provide a live chat function.
This can cause frustration for certain users and prevent them from accomplishing their goals when using proxies.
2. Limited Session Control
Time-varying residential proxies are all that can be obtained from Shifter.
You are stuck with the same IP for 5 minutes until it is banned; they don’t have high-rotating proxies that swap IPs after each request.
They should have made it more versatile by offering proxies with different time limits (one minute, ten minutes, or thirty minutes) as they don’t plan to give proxies that alternate internet protocol for every request.
3. Errors in Connection
Despite its usefulness in collecting data on numerous websites, using it on giants like Google and Amazon causes serious issues.
In order to utilize Google’s proxies, you will need to solve several captchas.
This may not be an issue for those who are technically savvy and familiar with captchas, but for the vast majority of users, it will be an unnecessary barrier to entry.
Shifter views Amazon as an outlier. Their Amazon proxies are inactive unless you contact support and get them activated on your account.
Even then, they’ll offer you a list of rules you have to go by or else they’ll turn off your account.
This means that you can’t use Shifter to steal information from services like Amazon and Google.
These two platforms aren’t the only ones they work on either; they work on others, too.
Shifter Pricing Review
There are two levels of residential proxies available from Shifter.
- Basic Backconnect Proxies
- Special Backconnect Proxies
There are 25 Basic Backconnect Proxies included in the 299 USD monthly package, and 10 Special Backconnect Proxies are available for an additional 199 USD monthly.
The cost goes up proportionally when more proxies are required.
The lowest monthly plan from Dedicated Datacenter Proxies is 30 USD and gives you access to 10 private HTTPS proxies located in the United States.
Shifter Text Performance Review
Shifter’s residential proxies fared about as well as expected as far as speed is concerned.
They never managed to outperform the other top home proxy service providers, but their results weren’t terrible, either.
On average, they take 4.426 seconds to respond.
My results on Speedtest.net for Shifter weren’t the best, but they were satisfactory.
- Upload (on average) is 25.92 megabits per second
- Download (on average) is 48.21 megabits per second
- Ping (on average) is 54 milliseconds
The connection failure rate skyrocketed as I progressively raised the number of simultaneous connections and placed a heavy demand on the proxies.
Repeating the test has confirmed my first conclusion that Shifter’s rate of connection errors is quite high.
I encountered various roadblocks while using popular search engines like Google and Yandex.
Yandex has a very strong filtering system in place to prevent the use of Shifters Proxies.
I also saw multiple 503-error (ReCAPTCHA) blockages while using Google.
There were a lot of 401, 403, and 503 issues, as well as CAPTCHA confirmations when I tried to connect to Amazon employing this proxy.
In order to bypass the Amazon firewall, I had to extend the Shifter’s package to include more than a hundred ports.
It happened to me at both eBay and Best Buy. In contrast, AliExpress’s integration was simple and quick.
My Verdict: Is Shifter Legit or Scam?
Having reviewed Shifter’s pros and cons as well as its specification and feature, I will say that it is legit.
One of the best proxy service providers is Shifter.io. Prices for their proxies are low, and they provide a variety of pricing tiers.
They provide limitless bandwidth while maintaining one of the biggest IP pools available.
While there are some drawbacks, employing their services will be a positive experience ultimately.
FAQs
Q. What do you use proxies for?
The term “proxy server” refers to a system that acts as an intermediary between users and the wider web. That’s why it’s useful for keeping intruders out of a closed network. As a server, it is sometimes known as an “intermediary” due to its role in connecting users to the websites they access.
Q. Is it legal to use proxies?
The use of a proxy server itself does not violate any laws. Proxy usage may or may not be lawful depending on context and region. Using a proxy server to access blocked content or the internet altogether is potentially unlawful in certain jurisdictions.
Q. Can I trust Shifter proxy?
Shifter proxies are legit and 100% trustworthy. You can trust them for anything security and anonymity-related service.
Conclusion
From what I have reviewed about Shifter, it is clear that it is a great proxy provider. I will definitely recommend its service to anyone as a result of the geo-distribution of its proxies as well as its pricing.
Though Shifter services are convenient, they should be purchased with caution due to connection failures and a lack of session-based IP address changes.
Shifter.io is an excellent service for anybody in need of high-quality results from either home or data center proxies; however, I did find that several of their promises were not genuine.
When it comes to safety, Shifter is among the best since it uses HTTPS and SOCKS5. Because of how well it handles authentication and Internet Protocol whitelisting, it has a lot going for it.
