Teams usually overspend on proxies in one of two ways. Some pay residential rates for jobs a datacenter IP would handle without trouble. Others save money with datacenter IPs on a site that turns them away, then lose hours to retries and gaps in their reports. Both mistakes come from picking one type for the whole company instead of one per workflow.
Below is how the four types we sell compare, followed by a table matching common team jobs to a starting type.
Datacenter: server addresses at a lower rate
What it is: an IP owned by a hosting or cloud company and served from its data centres.
Where it pays off: speed and cost. Connections run on fast server backbones, and the per-GB rate is lower than on any of our other types.
Where it struggles: the network an IP belongs to (its ASN) is public information. Sites that use bot-management services can see that a datacenter address belongs to a hosting company, and they often challenge or block it.
Good fit for: QA of your own sites and landing pages, public pages on sites that accept server traffic (news, smaller stores, public catalogues), internal tools and uptime checks.
Residential: household addresses and local results
What it is: an IP that a home internet provider has assigned to a household. Our residential pool is consent-based: the people whose connections carry the traffic have opted in.
Where it pays off: sites treat the visit as an ordinary household one, and you can target a country, or a city where available, to see the local version of a page. Sites with bot protection are generally far more willing to serve a residential visitor than a server address.
Where it struggles: speed depends on the household connection behind each IP, so it is slower than datacenter. Billing is per GB, which makes image-heavy pages more expensive to check, and the odd IP drops out of the pool mid-session.
Good fit for: local rank tracking, ad verification, competitor price monitoring on protected retail sites, market research and regional pricing audits.
Mobile 4G/5G: carrier addresses for mobile-first platforms
What it is: an IP from a mobile carrier network, the same kind of address a phone receives on cellular data.
Where it pays off: mobile-first platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are built around this connection type, and websites return their mobile versions to it. Carriers also reassign these IPs on their own over time.
Where it struggles: a higher per-GB rate than datacenter or residential, and latency that varies with the carrier network.
Good fit for: signed-in work on mobile-first social platforms within their terms, checking mobile ad placements and testing the mobile versions of your own pages.
Residential Premium, including static (ISP) IPs
What it is: our higher-trust residential tier. It is also where our static residential IPs sit, the kind often sold elsewhere as "ISP proxies". There is no separate ISP plan with us; our page on ISP proxies explains how they are supplied.
Where it pays off: sites that are strict about which connections they accept, and work that needs one fixed IP for the life of the order, such as long signed-in sessions or one IP per client account.
Where it struggles: cost. It is priced above our other three types per GB, so keep it for the targets that need it.
Matching team workflows to a type
| Team workflow | Start with |
|---|---|
| QA of your own sites and landing pages by country | Datacenter |
| Price and stock checks on sites that accept server traffic | Datacenter |
| Competitor price monitoring on protected retail sites | Residential, rotating |
| Local search rank tracking | Residential, rotating |
| Ad verification and regional ad previews | Residential, plus mobile 4G/5G for mobile placements |
| Client accounts on Facebook, X or LinkedIn | Residential sticky, or Residential Premium for a fixed IP per account |
| Client accounts on Instagram or TikTok | Mobile 4G/5G |
| Restock and price monitors for retail releases | Residential, rotating |
| Strict sites that turn other traffic away | Residential Premium |
Every row assumes publicly available data and work that stays within each platform's terms of service.
Start low and move up when the results say so
Begin with the least expensive type that should work for the target, check how the target sees it with our anonymity checker, and move up a tier only when blocks show up in your results. Many teams end up running two types side by side as separate orders in the same dashboard. For the two types most teams buy first, read datacenter or residential: how business teams decide.
