What 9Proxy Sells and How the Billing Works
9Proxy sells individual residential IPs with unmetered bandwidth attached instead of metering traffic by the gigabyte. Buy an IP, push as much data through it as you want, stop paying when it dies. Most of the residential market bills per gigabyte, so this is the one thing that separates 9Proxy from the field.
IP lifetime is the catch nobody advertises clearly. An address can survive up to 24 hours, but the practical average sits closer to a few hours. If you need one stable address for a full working day, you will consume far more IPs than the entry price implies. A parallel GB-based plan exists for teams that prefer traffic-metered billing.
Pool claims have moved around enough to flag. Older marketing and the company's own Trustpilot profile still describe roughly 9 million IPs across 92 countries, while current pages claim 20 million after a 2025 merger with BeeProxy. Neither figure is audited, and the advertised starting price shifts depending on which ad-tagged landing page you arrive on. Read it as marketing, not spec.
Protocol support covers HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, with country, city and ISP targeting. One structural detail most reviews skip: IP-based plans route through a desktop client rather than handing you a proxy list. If your pipeline runs headless on a server, check this before spending anything.
Also Read: Webshare Proxy Review: Pricing, Features
The 9Proxy Outage and Current Status
The service is running again, and it has never explained why it stopped. That is the whole status. Anyone evaluating 9Proxy today is buying from a provider with an unexplained gap in its operating history.
The failure was total rather than degraded. The website returned hosting-level errors, the desktop client timed out and left users unable to open or hold sessions, and support stopped answering. Coverage at the time noted the only official word was a brief service disruption notice, with no cause given and no recovery estimate.
Speculation ran toward enforcement, largely because the IPIDEA takedown was still fresh in the industry's memory. That comparison does not survive contact with the evidence. Genuine enforcement actions produce seized domains, named defendants and agency press releases, and none of those materialized. Domain registration stayed clean throughout. This was an outage of undisclosed cause, not a seizure.
Recovery took roughly two and a half weeks and arrived unevenly. Public pages and logins came back before anything else, bandwidth-based plans were restored ahead of IP-based ones, and reseller panels were still reporting IP plans under maintenance long after the site itself loaded normally. No post-incident writeup has followed.
Prepaid balances sat unusable for weeks with no refund path, while the standing policy only credits an IP that dies within roughly 60 seconds of allocation. Neither protects you in an incident of this shape. A provider that publishes no status page and no explanation after going dark gives you nothing to plan around, so verify the workflow you depend on before committing spend, and keep a funded fallback live.
9Proxy Alternatives Worth Considering in 2026
The right replacement depends on what drew you to 9Proxy. If it was the per-IP unmetered model, the nearest matches are other budget residential vendors operating on the same thin margins, and you inherit the same category risk you just got burned by. If it was simply cheap residential IPs without the fragility, that is a solvable problem.
Proxyon covers the same ground with a different structure. Residential proxies run pay-as-you-go across 195 countries with city-level targeting, sticky and rotating sessions, and bandwidth that never expires. No KYC, no subscription, so you deposit, test against real targets, and stop when you want. Uptime sits on a live status page rather than a sales page, which is the exact thing 9Proxy could not offer during its outage. For softer targets, datacenter proxies handle volume far cheaper, and ISP proxies cover static addresses that still read as residential.
Whatever you move to, judge it on the things the outage exposed rather than on headline price. Ask whether uptime is published somewhere you can verify independently, whether your balance survives an incident, whether the refund window is measured in seconds or in something reasonable, and whether support answers a human at 2 a.m. Then run your own targets through a trial before you migrate a single pipeline.
Also Read: What is Geo-Targeting With Residential Proxies
FAQ Section
Is 9Proxy still working in 2026?
Yes, with caveats. The service recovered from the June 28 outage around mid-July 2026. Bandwidth plans returned first and IP-based plans took longer. No root cause was published, so treat availability as unverified until you test your own workflow.
Was 9Proxy shut down or seized?
No evidence supports a seizure. Domain registration stayed normal throughout, no agency named the company, and no seizure notice appeared. It was an outage of undisclosed cause.
Why is 9Proxy's Trustpilot rating so low?
Most negative reviews center on the refund policy and the delivery model. Credit is only issued for an IP that dies within roughly 60 seconds of allocation, so buyers who found the service unsuitable could not recover their spend. The desktop-client requirement on IP plans also catches people who expected a proxy list.
Does 9Proxy offer datacenter or mobile proxies?
No. The network is residential-only. There are no datacenter, ISP or mobile products and no managed scraper or SERP API, so teams needing a mixed stack have to source those elsewhere.
Is the per-IP model actually cheaper than per-GB?
It depends on session length. Unmetered bandwidth per IP wins when you push heavy traffic through few addresses over long sessions. Short, high-rotation crawling burns IPs faster than the price implies, and per-GB billing usually costs less for that pattern.
Final Thoughts
9Proxy's per-IP unmetered model is a real idea, and for long sessions or multi-account work it prices better than most of the per-GB market. The problem is not the product, it is the operational record behind it. Two and a half weeks of total downtime, stranded prepaid balances, a 60-second refund window and no post-incident explanation are not things you can engineer around.
