Shifter is taunted as one of the top proxy providers — but reviews about it performance is not readily available as you would expect for a popular residential proxy network. If you are interested in a comprehensive review of Shifter residential proxies, then the Shifter review below is for you.
For long, the residential proxy network has been dominated by top proxy networks that speak the same language, as pricing has always been based on consumable bandwidth. However, Shifter introduced the unlimited bandwidth residential proxy service to the top tiers.
And till date, it remains the best provider in such regard. But should offering unlimited bandwidth make one purchase them alone? How about their performance, location coverage, the pricing itself, and other must-have features in a residential proxy network? In this Shifter review article, I will be taking a look at all of these.
Table Of Contents
Shifter.io offers various proxy solutions, including residential proxies, shared dedicated proxies, and web scraping APIs. Their residential proxies provide worldwide geolocation, no IP blocks, and country targeting. Shared dedicated proxies use fast datacenter IPs from multiple subnets. The web scraping API allows users to extract raw HTML from any website without worrying about proxies, CAPTCHAs, or JavaScript rendering issues.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Large proxy pool: Shifter.io offers a pool of over 31 million residential and data center IPs worldwide. | Limited locations for dedicated and shared proxies: Shifter.io offers only a single location for dedicated and shared proxies. |
| Unlimited bandwidth: All proxy packages come with unlimited bandwidth. | Connection errors: Some users have reported connection errors while using Shifter.io proxies. |
| Affordable pricing: Shifter.io offers reasonably priced proxy packages. | Connection speed: Connection speeds may not be as powerful as those offered by similar service providers. |
| Residential proxies: Shifter.io provides residential proxies, which are highly demanded and effective for various use cases. | Limited session control: Shifter.io only offers residential proxies that change over a certain period. |
| Worldwide coverage: Shifter.io proxies are available in every country. | No free trial: Shifter.io does not offer a free trial due to abuse by spammers. |
| User-friendly client dashboard: Shifter.io offers an easy-to-use dashboard for proxy configuration. | |
| 24/7 customer support: Shifter.io provides round-the-clock customer support. | |
| 3-day refund policy: Shifter.io offers a 3-day refund policy if the proxies fail to perform the assigned tasks. |
The shifter.io service is one of the oldest surviving residential proxy networks in the market. This provider started in 2012 as Microleaves before rebranding to Shifter because of the bad reputation of the name used online.
Currently, Shifter is one of the biggest proxy networks in the market, with proxies in a good number of proxy categories. In this article, our focus is on their residential proxies. Their residential proxies are backconnect proxies that provide you with unmetered bandwidth to use, but pricing is based on number of ports. One thing you will come to like about this provider is the large number of IPs in their pool.
Shifter has got a good location coverage that spans all of the continents in the world. Performance-wise, there are two sides to the story. When I carried out my performance test, the result was kind of average of what is obtainable in the market. First, the speed was average, not as the provider wants us to believe it is one of the fastest in the market. There are some other users that complain of connection errors when scraping, but those reviews were quite dated and old. Aside from the performance concern, which I didn’t experience during my performance test, there are no other issues with this provider.
Shifter.io is realted to Internet Glass Limited is a registered company in Hong Kong. The company offers a wide range of proxy solutions, including residential proxies, data center proxies, and web scraping APIs. Their residential proxies provide global coverage, advanced configuration options, and low latencies optimized for data extraction
Residential proxy networks do not own the IPs in their pool — they are sourced via P2P networks. And for a residential proxy network to be worthy of use for real automation tasks at any reasonable scale, a provider needs millions of IPs in their IP. Shifter is one of the providers that have millions of IP addresses in its pool, and it is a flex for them. Currently, Shifter has got over 31 million IP addresses in its pool. This makes it one of the largest proxy pools in the market. It is important you know that this number has been quoted by them, as do other providers.
There is no way this can be verified. However, during the performance test for web scraping, I discovered that over 60 percent of the requests had a unique IP assigned to them after a session switch. This is the average unique IP percent you can get from the market, with only the likes of Bright Data, Smartproxy, and Oxylabs exceeding this number quite well. Generally, even though you are given access to a whole pool, you can’t access the 31 million IPs as all of these are not always online at the same time.
In terms of the number of IPs, Shifter is regarded as one of the largest proxy networks in the market. But what is the spread of these IPs in terms of location coverage, and how many countries have IP representation in their pool? It might interest you to know that most countries in the world are supported, as you can get IPs from over 170 countries from this provider. But when it comes to location coverage, that is not all that matters. This is because Shifter does have support for geo-targeting — a feature that allows you to choose IPs from a specific location. When you make use of this feature, you will discover the total number of IPs available to you has reduced drastically.
This has nothing to do with just Shifter — it is general with all providers in the market. For this reason, I recommend you do not make use of this feature, except there is a location requirement for your job. In this case, you will need to speak to the customer support of Shifter to make an inquiry on the number of IPs in their pool. You should only use them if the number of IPs is what you can use for your tasks. Aside from tasks that you need to access content restricted to certain geolocation, you are better of using this proxy network without geo-targeting to get IPs from all regions.
Proxies are known to reduce the speed of one's Internet connections, and residential proxies are even worse. It might interest you to know that when a provider has a speed of more than 15 Mbps, it is regarded as fast compared to datacenter proxies, where you get above 10 Mbps on average. I had to test the speed of Shifter residential proxies so you can have an idea of what to expect from this provider, and I used a custom tool to get this done. I tested the download and upload speed of their residential proxies as well as the ping and got the below result. The data provided is on average as thousands of requests were sent, and so the values vary greatly.
| Website | Download Speed (Mbps) | Upload Speed (Mbps) | Ping |
| Amazon | 14.87 | 18.76 | 73 |
| 13.65 | 17.43 | 97 | |
| YouTube | 17.08 | 21.11 | 79 |
| Google Search | 13.76 | 15.39 | 93 |
| Booking | 10.99 | 19.51 | 104 |
The result above shows the speed and performance of the Shifter residential proxies. Looking at the result, you will notice that all of the results have a download speed of more than 10 Mbps, and with this, we can consider Shifter as a fast proxy network. However, this is not breaking any record as there are other providers I regard as the fastest such as Bright Data, Smartproxy, and Oxylabs. The likes of Soax is even faster. Generally, when I increase the number of threads, the performance was still maintained, which makes it quite scalable and perfect for use by enterprises.
If you are dealing with a residential proxy network, just know that rotation of IP is a must as they do not have control over the IPs in their pool. And as your IP address is changed, your session is destroyed, and a new one is created. The residential proxies of Shifter are backconnect proxies that rotate IP for you automatically. However, the IP rotation system of Shifter is time-based; it changes IP after a specific period of time. In the past, IP rotation for Shifter is done after every 5 minutes, and if you have read any review that carries this, then just know that that is an old review. Currently, the IP rotation system does support IP rotation between 1 - 60 minutes.
However, you need to know that there is no guarantee that an IP will remain online that long. If you need to maintain a session for a long period of time, more than 30 minutes, I suggest you go for static residential proxies, as that is what they are suited for. Shifter, unlike Bright Data, Smartproxy, and their likes, does not offer high rotating proxies that change IP after every request. If that is what you want, then you will need to use the multiple ports from them and rotate them to get that. For an out-of-the-box solution, just go for any of the aforementioned proxy networks.
Scraping data from the web is one of the major use cases of residential proxies because of their undetectability and IP rotation feature. Interestingly, it is also one of the activities that can quickly reveal the weakness of any proxy network, especially when used at a reasonable scale to scrape millions of pages, as low-powered providers will begin to underperform. In this section of the Shifter review article, I present to you, my finding with respect to the scraping performance and response speed test. The data were obtained during the speed performance test above, but I decided to present it as a separate section for readability and easy understanding.
| Site | Success Rate (%) | Avg. Response Rate (sec) |
| Amazon | 91.97 | 2.01 |
| 89.65 | 2.22 | |
| YouTube | 93.89 | 2.65 |
| Google Search | 90.31 | 2.19 |
| Booking | 87.84 | 3.07 |
The result above might not be impressive or even break any record, but this is about the average you can get from most providers. The Shifter residential proxy network has come a long way. If you had read some of the reviews online, you will notice many stating that the scraping performance of Shifter is terrible. From experience, this is an old story as the network has reinvented itself, and that is why I got the result above. Bear in mind that for you to successfully use the Shifter residential network, you need to know to use it because of the non-availability of high-rotating proxies.
Pricing is an important factor that determines the proxies one can access. And Shifter has defined its own to keep small proxy users out of its customer base. In a market where the top providers like Bright Data and Oxylabs are adapting the Pay-As-You-Go model to make them more affordable, Shifter has it starting pegged at $199 for its special rotating proxies. The pricing for Shifter is based on number of ports, as you can enjoy unlimited bandwidth. For the smallest package, you are given 5 ports. Other plans include $299 for 10 ports, $599 for 25 ports, and $1,199 for 50 ports, among others.
With this provider, you can’t run out of payment methods as you can pay with most of the popular methods ranging from card payment to PayPal and even Bitcoin. There is no free trial available, and you need a strong case to get a refund, as it is processed on a case-by-case basis and at their discretion. It is important you know that the unlimited bandwidth support is not truly unlimited. There is an actual limit, but this is way more than what you get from other providers. Take, for instance, the smallest plan has a limit of 200 GB, which makes it look like you are given unlimited bandwidth.
From the review you read above, you can tell Shifter is significantly different from most of the other rotating residential proxies out there. This means that many users would need to use support for clarifications at one time or the other. What system is in place to make sure these customers get the help they need at the time needed? When it comes to customer support, Shifter knows how to deliver on that. On all of the pages on their website, there is a live chat support button conspicuously displayed in the top right corner.
They do have a good number of agents available to attend to customers. These agents are knowledgeable about the proxy space and what proxies are used for. They also have an understanding of their own ecosystem. This means that you won’t be dealing with clueless agents that will waste your time. At the time of writing this article, I spoke with an agent, and the agent was responsive, helpful, and polite. But you need to know they are not always available for live chat support.
Outside of work hours, you will need to use their email support feature. For this, you will need to wait for a few hours to get a response back. Aside from these two channels, registered users can open support tickets. The service also has social media channels you can use to communicate with their agents.
The Shifter service offers a good number of proxies and other proxy-like services, as in the case of web scraping APIs. However, looking at its user dashboard, help document, and API documentation, you can tell it did a good job at making things easier for its users. The user dashboard is initiative and minimalistic, with only useful UI elements displayed. You do not need to go many clicks to access proxies or proxy setups. It also provided guides on how to use its proxies for a good number of tasks on the Internet.
The only major problem you will have to deal with when using this service is at the point of registration. As a user of their rotating residential proxies, you are required to go through their KYC procedure to avoid abuse. Not many are OK with this. Aside from this, the other methods, including the purchase of proxies, are seamless, as the service support all popular payment methods. In case you are stuck, the customer service agents are available to put you through.
The Shifter network is a developer-friendly proxy network. This is because of its easy-to-use developer API for most of its proxy products, especially the ones most used by developers. It does have a developer API for both its static and rotating residential proxies. The service also provides developer API for all of the web scraping APIs it provides. One thing you will come to like about Shifter developer support is the useful endpoint it comes with.
For the rotating residential proxies, it does have endpoints for retrieving all proxies, getting regions, fetching authorized IPs, and even authorizing IPs for IP authentication, among others. However, while the developer support is top-notch in terms of the availability of developer APIs, the service needs to work on its documentation. The documentations look like something that was hurriedly put together and left to rot. It took me some digging to understand what some of the endpoints mean.
The twist of allowing users to enjoy unlimited bandwidth sounds like a good deal for those that consume a lot of bandwidth. But this is not the only perk you get from using Shifter; the performance, especially in areas of scalability, is one of the best you get as it is meant for enterprise usage. While it does have a few cons, it is definitely good enough for your usage, and for this reason, I recommend the use of their proxies. However, I recommend you read more about their proxy rotation system to know if it is the best for you.