SimplyNode Review

Do you want to know my honest take on SimplyNode? I have written a review and discussed several aspects of the service ranging from its pool size, location coverage, effectiveness, pricing, and more in the form of pros and cons.

SimplyNode claims to be a service that offers proxies that do the work. That’s a big statement to make and as a proxy reviewer, it is my duty to hold them accountable for their work.

If you are on this page, I know you have several questions you need answers to such as how does it perform in terms of speed and undetectability?  What is the size of their pool and how many locations do they support? The answers to all of these will be made available in this SimplyNode review. However, we need to first take a look at an overview of the service.

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SimplyNode Overview

SimplyNode is a proxy provider with proxies in the residential and mobile market. Their most popular product is the residential proxy and that is the one I will focus on in this review. It claims to have over 50 million IP addresses, sourced from over 180 countries across the globe and allows you to choose IPs from specific countries, states, cities, and ISPs.

The service has a list of blocked sites list you can’t access using their service. It equally has some cons you should be aware of before making a purchase decision. Let's get started with the pros of the service and later move to the cons.

Visit SimplyNode.io

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Pros of SimplyNode

The SimplyNode website is minimalistic but underneath it is a powerful residential proxy that competes with even the top providers in the market. Below are some of its core strengths.

Large Proxy Pool

SimplyNode has over 50 million IP addresses in its pool. This is a big pool, compared to the other providers in the market. To put things into perspective, only a few providers have a pool as big as this. Oxylabs has over 100 million IPs, Bright Data boasts over 72 million, and Smartproxy claims to have over 55 million IPs.

Aside from the aforementioned and a few others, most providers are well behind SimplyNode. Take, for example, the likes of Shifter, Proxy-Cheap, Rayobytes, and Hydraproxy all have fewer IPs below 10 million.

One thing you need to know about all these numbers is that you can’t have access to the whole 50 million of SimplyNode, 100 million IPs of Oxylabs, and 72 million of that of Bright Data. This is because not all of them are active at the same time. The IPs are gotten via P2P networks and the services do not have control over them.

With a pool of 50 million IPs, you can be sure there will be a sizeable percentage available for you to use for your mid to large-scale projects. This size of pool can efficiently handle millions of requests without getting blocked. I did send over 500K requests with 300 concurrent connections and the repeated IPs are less than 20%.

Extensive Location Coverage

While having a big pool is important extensive location coverage is equally important especially if a task requires IPs from specific locations as in the case of localized scraping, ads verification, geo-content unblocking, and some other location-based content accessing.

It might interest you to know that SimplyNode has one of the best location support so far, directly competing with the likes of Bright Data, Oxylabs, Nimbleway, and Smartproxy. In this aspect, almost all proxy providers have extensive location support. What sets it apart from the rest is its precise and granular location-targeting support.

Only a few residential proxy services support both state and city-level targeting and the SimplyNode is one of those. You can also target specific ISPs in these locations. However, While the service provides these targeting options, there is a downside to it. The more granular you go with your targeting, the fewer the number of IPs available to you.

Take, for instance, while there are over 50 million IPs in the pool, if you choose to target Australia as the country you need IPs from, the number of IPs you have access to comes down to 100K. You can imagine choosing a specific state or city in Australia?

The number of IPs might come down to 5K. Generally, except if your target area is popular in their network (need to confirm from support), you will not want to use the region or city targeting option.

Undetectable IPs

Another pros of the service you will come to like is its undetectable IPs. The service is an anonymous proxy service that hides all of the footprints one can use to detect you are using a proxy. Interestingly, the IP addresses it uses are real user IP addresses, the kind of IP addresses that can’t be detected as proxies.

But how does this work? Well, SimplyNode routes your request via devices of regular Internet users, making it look as if they are the originators of the requests not knowing they are just a proxy.

The good thing here is that the service obtained permission to make use of their device resources including IP address and bandwidth — this makes it an ethical provider as the owners of the devices are aware and gave them consent, in exchange for using a paid app for free or some amount of money.

Interestingly, even in rare cases where you get blocked for any reason, you can be assured that SimplyNode will automatically switch your IP address from the first denial of your request. However, while the network itself is developed to be undetectable, you can make it detected by your actions. Sending too many requests with rotating IPs too quickly for session-based tasks without rotating accounts or sessions will give you out too quickly.

Great Session Control with Rotating Ports

Let me start by saying SimplyNode residential proxy network is essentially a rotating proxy — you shouldn’t expect to keep the same IP address for too long even if they claim to allow that. This is because they do not have control over the activeness of the IPs and as such, they use the one that is available.

Generally, IPs are rotated automatically for you. However, its rotating feature is not as high rotating as the likes of Bright Data. Unlike Bright Data or Smartproxy which rotate IP after every request, the shortest period an IP can be switched is 90 seconds. This is already a minute and a half.

The rotation period supported includes 90 seconds, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, and 6 hours. However, there is support for custom rotation between 1 minute 30 seconds to 6 hours. If you need to rotate IP after every request, then you will have to use multiple proxy endpoints generated using their proxy list generator.

But when it comes to session management, it gives you one of the best support in the market. Considering it can offer you sessions above 1 hour, I will say it provides you with better session control than even Bright Data.

However, you shouldn’t get carried away and avoid using the longer session period — 30 minutes and 1 hour should be the longest. This is because the chances of your IP getting changed increase as the duration it is maintained increases.

High Concurrency with Proxy List Generation Support

The SimplyNode service is highly performant, especially in the areas of concurrency. There is no explicitly stated limit to the number of concurrent sessions and connections you can create. Take, for instance, while testing out their proxies some while ago, I sent over 500K requests using 300 concurrent connections to fasten the process and it worked with no limit placed and I didn’t get blocked by my target website.

But 300 threads is not the ceiling, you can go higher. In fact, the SimplyNode service has been built to handle thousands of connections.

To get more unique IPs out of your operations if you want to use such a high number of threads, you should make use of the proxy list generator. This will help you generate multiple proxy endpoints you can use and each endpoint will have its IP assigned to it and equally rotates it at your configured interval. There is no extra cost to using the proxy list generator tool.

Affordable Pricing with Non-Expiring Bandwidth

Perhaps, if there is just one unique selling point of SimplyNode, then it has to be its non-expiring bandwidth. The rest of the market sells their proxies with expiring dates. However, if you purchase bandwidth from SimplyNode, then you have to have it to yourself until you consume it.

This is especially useful for those who have unpredictable usage and don’t know how much bandwidth to purchase — you can purchase high volume and use it anytime you want.

Interestingly, the price per GB is cheap. It starts from $6 per GB. Depending on the package you subscribe to, you can also get a discount. Take, for instance, if you purchase 29GB, the price per GB is $5 — the per GB can also be as low as $2.5. However, bear in mind that you are not forced into any commitment, you can purchase just 1GB but to get a discount, you have to purchase more.

While the non-expiring feature is great pricing is affordable, and the service does not offer a free trial but a discount on first-time purchases. However, there is a 14-day refund policy in place which can be activated if you meet certain terms.

Swift Customer support

The team at SimplyNode understands what it takes to provide customer support. I know this because I have had reasons to make use of their customer support feature and the response was fast. Actually, I did make use of their live chat support. On the two occasions, I contacted their customer support for assistance, I got a response in less than 5 minutes.

The agents I spoke with were knowledgeable and helpful enough to get my issues resolved. However, the live chat support is not always online. If there is no agent online at the time you contact them on live chat, you will be contacted via email and the waiting time is just a few hours — can be shorter actually.

Ease of Usage

Another area you will appreciate the SimplyNode service is in the area of ease of use. The user experience has been designed in such a way that you only take a few steps to get the proxy details. The website looks very minimal as the user dashboard is only one page. From the same page, you can configure the proxies and get your proxy details.

From the user dashboard, you can see available traffic and used traffic. You can set the rotation of the proxy and the geo-targeting which supports country, region, city, and ISP. In terms of authentication, you can either use the username/password authentication or whitelist your IP address.

There are multiple payment options you can choose from depending on which is easiest to use. You can either pay with a card, direct bank transfer, Apple Pay, or cryptocurrency. It is important you know that payment via cryptocurrencies is not eligible for a refund if you should you find that their proxies didn’t work for you.

If you need to get a refund, you will have to contact their customer support and there is no support for doing that on their website. It is important you know refund request is treated on a per-case basis and have terms and conditions that must be met.

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SimplyNode Cons

No doubt, SimplyNode does have its strengths that make it one of the best residential proxies in the market. However, it does have some weaknesses. Below are some of them.

Performance Speed is Below Average

With all of the features above including their multithreaded support and the ability to send thousands of requests concurrently, you will think the team got everything figured out about performance. In the aspect of speed, there is still a lot of room for improvement. To start with, testing their performance speed is a pain as no value is recorded by speedtest.net which is the tool I use for testing speed on this blog. I now decided to use fast.com and I still didn’t get a final value.

The average is around 8Mbps with some occasionally going higher than 20 Mbps. The average speed for fast proxies is 20Mbps but it has not consistently crossed this limit. There is always the problem of not being able to capture a final speed value before an error is thrown. This only points to the fact that there needs to be some engineering in the networking aspect. However, it is still fast enough to get things done — not just one of the fastest out there.

No Free Trial

It is common for users to want to test out a proxy service before committing financially. If you are one of such users, then the SimplyNode service is not for you. This is because there is no free trial offered by the service. If you want to use their service, you need to pay. The closest you get to a free trial is a first-time bonus.

However, this shouldn’t be the reason you shouldn’t try out their service. The service has a generous 14-day refund policy which can help you get your money back within 14 days of paying for their proxies provided you didn’t consume a certain amount of bandwidth.

14 days are enough to try out their service and make a decision whether you want to continue with their service or ask for a refund provided you didn’t consume the amount of bandwidth that serves as the limit for asking for a refund.

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Do I Recommend SimplyNode?

Yes, I recommend SimplyNode as they offer good proxies. The service has one of the largest pools, big enough for large-scale scraping tasks. It has extensive location support with granular geo-targeting options and offers you one of the best session controls in the rotating proxy market.

However, it still does have a few things you need to consider most notably the speed. Yes, the speed is fast enough to get most tasks done. However, if your task requires super fast speed, then this might not be the best proxy service for you.

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