Storm Proxies review

Storm Proxies is a small-scale proxy service provider which, at first glance, might not look like it has much to offer - but the reality could be a little different.

The company's over 7,200,000 proxies can't match the millions you'll get from the top competition, for instance. Geo-targeting is mostly limited to very wide regions (USA, EU, Worldwide; US city coverage is Cheyenne, Los Angeles and New York.) Support is limited, and you only get a short 24 hours to try out the service.

But on the plus side, Storm Proxies isn't trying to pretend it's something it isn't, a one-stop solution to all your proxy needs. It does have worthwhile products to offer, including rotating dedicated and residential HTTP/HTTPS proxies, and dedicated proxies targeted at social media, ticket, sneaker and other sites. And great value pricing could make it a smart choice for small-time scrapers, social media managers and anyone else on an extreme budget.

Storm Proxies: Plans and pricing

Storm Proxies offers three types of proxies. These are rotating residential proxies, private dedicated proxies which offer data center IPs, and backconnect rotating proxies which have a mix of data center and residential IPs. 

Each of these proxies offers have multiple plans, all of which offer unlimited bandwidth. Instead of capping data transfers, Storm Proxies limits its their accounts by other factors. 

For instance, the private dedicated proxies limit accounts on the number of IPs. The smallest plan offers just 5 private proxies for $10/month, while the top most one offers 400 private proxies for $640400/month. All of these plans can run 100 concurrent threads, and supports multiple subnets. 

Backconnect rotating proxies are priced on the number of simultaneous connections. For $39/month you can run 40 simultaneous connections from a single access IP, all the way up to $97 a month for 150 simultaneous connections from up to three access IP’s. 

Finally, there’s the rotating residential proxies, and these with prices get based on the number of ports. Each port can run a maximum of 50 simultaneous connections. Each plan gets a certain number of ports that it can run, with access to the full 700k residential IP proxies, along with unlimited bandwidth. These plans start at $50/month for 5 ports, and go all the way up to 50 ports for $300/month. 

Other variations include proxy rotation times (there are 3, 5 and 15 minute options available.) The service also offers smaller and larger plans as well as specialized plans for specific targets, such as for sneakers or tickets. For example, you can get 5 private Twitter proxies for only $15 a month, which includes unlimited bandwidth.

Storm Proxies: Signing up

Storm Proxies does its best to point you in the right product direction. When we chose a regular residential IP rotating plan, for instance, the site warned 'these proxies are not for scraping search engines,', and pointed us to its dedicated rotating proxy page, instead. 

With the product identifiedFind the product you need, when trying to purchaseand Storm Proxies goes to unusual lengths for credential verificationto verify your details, asking for your name, email address and even phone number-  (you'll even be sent a code to verifyverification code by text, so this has to be correct.) 

Providing this level of personal detail always makes us uneasy. Still, if it means fewer customers abusing the service, and so fewer IP bans, there's a benefit for everyone.

Payment is supported by credit card (Visa, Amex, Mastercard an Discover), or PayPal, and Amazon Pay, but handing over your cash is still a little more difficult than it needs to be. The payment form assumes you're in the US, and rather than asking you to enter any PayPal account address, demands you use a US PayPal account and enter a zip code. There's a quick fix - choose your own country from the menu top-right - but this is still an odd issue we've not seen anywhere else.

Storm Proxies: Interface

We are pleased that Storm Proxies' web dashboard is just about as simple a setup as we've ever seen. An opening page displays your plan, renewal date and a Cancel link; and (for instance) your Residential Rotating Proxies page lists your proxies in IP:Port form, with a single access IP and a US or EU location selector. 

This is implemented in the most basic way possible, too. You'd hope the Access IP would set itself to your current IP by default, right? Unfortunately, this is not the case as But no: it's set to 1.1.1.1, and it requires a manual change to do something else you must change it manually. 

And, well, if you've got a list of 100 proxies, user might expect thatthe least the dashboard could do a is give you a Save As CSV or TXT, yes? Uh, no: it's just a plain textbox, and you'll have to do a copy and paste job to transfer your proxy details to anywhere else. 

Individual plans have their own technical limitations, too. As we mentioned, residential rotating proxies only support IP authentication, for instance, and you're only allowed one access IP, a hassle if you need to access the service from more than one network or device. Squid Proxies supports up to ten IPs, for more convenience. 

Our residential plan had no control over IP rotation time, either as: it gets's fixed at 5 minutes.

Storm Proxies: Interface and use

Although our Storm Proxies dashboard looked like it had been thrown together by someone in an afternoon (and that's with some time for a couple of not so short coffee breaks), there's a plus side: there is a minimal to no learning curveyou've almost nothing to learn. 

If you've some proxy experience, you'll figure out what to do at firsta glance. Here's the list of proxies; it's in IP:port format, so users don't have to worry about usernames and passwords.; you just need to put your real IP in the Access IP box, copy and paste the proxies and you’re ready to go. 

Even if you're a newbie, don’t won't waste your time wandering around looking for advanced settings- there simply are not any to be found, because there aren't any.

If you do run into any difficulties, Storm Proxies has a help site with advice. It's also basic in the extreme, although some articles do highlight details which aren't easy to spot elsewhere. 

For example, the 'What gateway to choose for rotating proxies?' article recommends that 'the number of threads for the harvester should not exceed 25% of the number of threads allowed for your account,' which is not something most users might have guessed otherwise. 

If the you don't find an answer is not inn the knowledge base, then you can contact Storm Proxies support directly. The company claims to offer 24/7 Premium Support,', but there's no live chat, and its own stats aren't that impressive: the company says '45% of emails are replied [sic] under one hour,', but it may take up to 24 hours to reach all the rest. Not a disaster, but not what we'd call 'Premium,', either. We also think the lack of a direct phone number, a chat, or a direct email are areas this service falls short, with the single option for direct contact a support portal.

Storm Proxies: Final verdict

Storm Proxies won't win over anyone with the shorter length of its feature list, and some of its issues, such as the inability to target specific countries outside the US, make it unusable for many proxy-related tasks. 

But if you can live However, for those that can work within its limits, Storm Proxies gives you a capable basic service from just a few dollars a month, that can scale to larger plans as your needs grow and that's just fine with us. Go give it a try.

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