Guides
Which proxy to buy, and what each choice costs you.
Which type to buy, which mode to run it in, and what each choice costs you. Written to be useful whether or not you buy from us.
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Residential vs datacenter vs mobile proxies
All five types compared on cost, speed and how often they get blocked, the short version of which to buy for what.
Choosing a provider
The questions worth asking before you spend anything, and the numbers worth ignoring.
Best proxy provider 2026
Nobody can answer this for you, and any page that answers it in its own favour has told you something about itself rather than about proxies. What can be answered is how to judge one, because almost every provider is measured on figures that are chosen to be flattering. Here is what those figures mean and what to test instead.
Read →Cheapest proxy provider 2026
Price per gigabyte is the number everyone compares and it is not comparable between pool types, between billing models, or sometimes between two plans from the same provider. This is what the number leaves out, and how to work out what a plan will actually cost you.
Read →Best residential proxies 2026
Residential is the pool most people end up on, and the one where the marketing is loudest. The differences that matter between networks are narrower than the advertising suggests, and three of them are checkable in a few minutes.
Read →Choosing a type
What each pool is actually good at, and what the trade costs you.
Residential proxies
A residential proxy routes your request through an IP address that a consumer internet provider assigned to a real home connection. To the site receiving it, the traffic originates from an ordinary household, because in terms of the address, it does.
Read →Datacenter proxies
Datacenter proxies run from hosting infrastructure. Nothing about the route is indirect, which makes them the fastest and cheapest option available, and also the easiest for a site to identify, because hosting ranges are published.
Read →ISP proxies
ISP proxies sit deliberately between the two main categories: the address is registered to a consumer internet provider, but the machine serving it lives in a data centre. You get how a residential address looks with how a datacenter connection performs.
Read →Mobile proxies
A mobile proxy exits through an address belonging to a cellular carrier, the same kind of address a phone on mobile data uses. Carriers place very large numbers of real subscribers behind each one, and that single fact is what makes them the hardest category to block.
Read →IPv6 proxies
IPv6 is the newer internet addressing scheme, and the supply is effectively unlimited. That abundance is why IPv6 proxies are the cheapest way to obtain a lot of addresses, and why one compatibility check decides whether they are useful to you at all.
Read →By what you are doing
The same question answered for specific jobs.
Proxies for web scraping
Scraping fails for one of two reasons: you are sending too many requests from one address, or the address you are sending from is obviously a server. Proxies solve the first problem completely and the second one depending on which type you buy.
Read →Proxies for price monitoring
Retailers show different prices to different people. Location, device and history all move the number, which means checking a competitor from one office IP tells you what they charge that office, not what they charge the market.
Read →Proxies for ad verification
Ad fraud works by showing the advertiser something different from what it shows everyone else. Checking a placement from a corporate IP that the network can identify defeats the exercise entirely, you are shown the compliant version.
Read →Proxies for SEO and rank tracking
Search results are personalised and localised. The ranking you see from your own connection is your ranking, in your city, with your history, not the position a customer in another market gets.
Read →Proxies for social media management
Social platforms link accounts by IP. Managing several from one connection is the fastest way to have them treated as one operator, and the remedy is a stable, believable address per account rather than a rotating pool.
Read →Proxies for market research
Most consumer facing sites serve different content by region, catalogue, availability, language, promotions. Researching a market from outside it returns the version shown to outsiders, which is rarely the version that matters.
Read →Proxies for testing from other regions
Anything you ship that behaves differently by region needs testing from that region. Geo gating, localised pricing, CDN routing and consent banners all key off the connecting address, and none of them can be verified from your own desk.
Read →How it works
The settings people get wrong, and what they cost when you do.
Rotating vs sticky proxies
This choice causes more avoidable failures than the choice of proxy type. Both modes are available on every pool we sell, and picking the wrong one produces problems that look like blocking but are not.
Read →HTTP vs SOCKS5 proxies
Both protocols are offered on every pool we sell, and for ordinary web traffic the practical difference is smaller than the amount written about it. The distinction matters when your traffic is not web traffic.
Read →Buy proxies with cryptocurrency
Payment here is by cryptocurrency, and there is no identity verification. An email address and a password open an account; a top up funds it; the balance is spent on whatever you buy.
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