Guide
Residential against datacenter against mobile.
Five types, and the choice is almost always a trade between cost and how often you get blocked. This is the short version of which to buy for what.
The short answer
Getting blocked?
Move up the list, datacenter to ISP to residential to mobile. Each step costs more and gets blocked less.
Not getting blocked?
Move down it. Paying residential rates for a target that never checks is money spent on nothing.
Need one IP to persist?
Use a sticky session on ISP or residential. Rotating changes the IP per request, which breaks anything holding a login.
The five types
Residential proxies
IP addresses assigned by consumer internet providers to real homes.
What they are good at: Sites that block obvious server traffic. The IP looks like a person on a home connection, because it is one.
Use them for: Scraping protected sites, ad verification, checking localised pricing and search results.
- Cost
- Higher, billed per gigabyte
- Speed
- Moderate, routed through a real connection
- Blocking
- Rarely blocked
Datacenter proxies
IPs belonging to hosting providers, served straight from a data centre.
What they are good at: Speed and cost. Nothing about the route is indirect, so throughput is the highest available.
Use them for: High volume work against sites that do not fingerprint, internal testing, anything where throughput matters more than looking residential.
- Cost
- Lowest
- Speed
- Fastest
- Blocking
- Blocked most often, the IP ranges are published and easy to identify
ISP proxies
IPs registered to a consumer provider but hosted in a data centre.
What they are good at: The compromise. Residential looking registration with datacenter speed and stability.
Use them for: Long sessions that must stay on one IP without looking like a server, account management, sustained monitoring.
- Cost
- Between residential and datacenter
- Speed
- Fast
- Blocking
- Uncommon
Mobile proxies
IPs from cellular carriers, shared across many real phone users.
What they are good at: The hardest to block. Carriers put thousands of genuine users behind one address, so blocking it blocks real customers.
Use them for: Mobile first platforms and social apps, where anything but a carrier IP is treated as suspicious.
- Cost
- Highest
- Speed
- Variable, it is a mobile network
- Blocking
- Almost never blocked
IPv6 proxies
Addresses from the newer, vastly larger address space.
What they are good at: Cost. There are effectively unlimited IPv6 addresses, so they are the cheapest way to get many of them.
Use them for: Targets that support IPv6 and where you need volume cheaply. Useless against a site that is IPv4 only, check first.
- Cost
- Lowest per address
- Speed
- Fast
- Blocking
- Depends entirely on the target
Rotating or sticky?
Rotating
A different IP on every request. Right for crawling many pages, where each request is independent and looking like one visitor is the thing you are avoiding.
Sticky
The same IP held for a set window. Required for anything with a session, a login, a cart, a multi step form. Changing IP mid session is what gets an account flagged.
Both are available on every pool we sell, over HTTP and SOCKS5, with country targeting on the pools that support it. The generator builds the lines for you, you pick the pool, the mode and the count.