ISP or datacenter proxies? A guide for per-IP buyers

If you want an IP address that stays yours for the whole term, you are choosing between two lines: ISP and datacenter. Both are static. Both are billed per IP for a term you pick. Both let you choose the country, region and city on our side. From a distance they look like the same product twice.

The difference is one line in a public database. It is why ISP costs more, and for some targets it decides everything.

Who the address belongs to

Every IP address is announced to the internet by a network, identified by an autonomous system number (ASN) with an organisation name attached. Anyone can look it up, and bot-management tools do it on every request.

• A datacenter IP is announced by a hosting company or cloud provider. The lookup says so plainly.
• An ISP IP is announced by a consumer internet provider, the same kind of company that runs home broadband. The machine behind it still sits in a data centre, so it is fast and stays up, but the lookup shows a provider that ordinarily serves homes and small businesses.

That is the entire trade. An ISP IP keeps the speed and stability of a server and borrows some of the standing of a home connection. You can check which one you were given in a couple of minutes; checking what kind of IP you were sold shows how.

Side by side

	Datacenter	ISP
Registered to	A hosting or cloud company	A consumer internet provider
Where the server sits	A data centre	A data centre
Address	Fixed for the term	Fixed for the term
Country, region, city choice	Yes	Yes
Choice of internet provider	No	Yes
Billed	Per IP, per term	Per IP, per term
Price per IP	Lower	Higher

When datacenter is enough

Start here if the target does not care who owns your address, which covers more sites than most guides admit:

• public APIs, documentation, forums and open data portals;
• your own staging servers, load tests and uptime checks;
• many news and reference sites, and anything you have tested and found open.

If a hundred requests through one datacenter IP come back as real pages, you have your answer. Residential or datacenter has the same test in more detail.

When ISP earns its place

ISP is for the case where a target filters hosting networks and you also need an address that holds still:

• Logged-in work. An account that sees its session hop between addresses looks compromised. A static ISP IP gives it one stable, ordinary-looking home.
• Location that matters. Our residential line rotates without a country choice. When you need to appear in a particular country, city or even a particular provider's network, ISP is the line that does all three.
• Long sessions on filtered sites. Where datacenter ranges are refused outright but the job needs one address for a long time, rotating residential is the wrong shape.

If datacenter already works on your target, ISP will work too, but it costs more and buys you nothing extra.

Before you order

• Test with one IP of each. Put the same hundred requests through both and count how many real pages each returns.
• Look at both ladders on the pricing page. Each line has its own ladder by order size, and datacenter is the cheaper of the two at every size. ISP costs more because the address is registered to a consumer internet provider, so pay for it only where the target checks.
• Check whether the IP is shared or yours alone. Some IP plans are shared with a small number of other customers and others are dedicated. The order form says which you are buying; a shared IP can inherit someone else's reputation on a target.
• Budget for the renewal. A renewal is charged at the line's entry rate, not at the lower rung your first order reached. Plan with that figure so the next term holds no surprise.

Unsure which fits your target? Tell us what you are hitting in Discord. If datacenter will do, we will say so.