The Ultimate Guide To Proxy IP Types

Datacenter

Hosted on servers in a datacenter and announced by a hosting ASN. Cheapest and fastest by a wide margin, available in huge quantities, and instantly recognisable to any site that checks. Perfect for internal tools, uptime monitoring, bulk downloads and targets that don't defend themselves. Useless against strict platforms.

ISP (static residential)

Addresses registered to a consumer ISP but hosted on datacenter hardware. You get residential-looking reputation with datacenter speed and a static address that doesn't change. The sweet spot for long-lived accounts, whitelisted integrations and anything needing a fixed identity that still passes as a home connection. Pools are smaller and prices sit between datacenter and residential.

Residential

Real IPs on real home connections, borrowed through a peer network. Highest compatibility with consumer-facing sites, huge geographic spread, and rotation built in. Slower and priced per gigabyte, because you're paying for someone's actual line. The default for scraping consumer sites, ad verification and geo-specific research.

Mobile

IPs from 4G and 5G carriers. Because carriers put thousands of subscribers behind one address via CGNAT, blocking a mobile IP is expensive for a site — so these carry the most trust. Also the most expensive and the least predictable in throughput. Reserve them for the platforms that reject everything else.

Choosing quickly

Two more axes

Shared vs exclusive — exclusive whenever an account is involved. Rotating vs sticky — rotate for crawls, stick for sessions.

Most production setups mix types: datacenter for the cheap half of the workload, residential for the half that gets blocked, and a few ISP or mobile addresses for the accounts that must never wobble. Paying residential rates for traffic that datacenter could handle is the most common way teams overspend.