Residential or datacenter proxies? Start cheap
Most people buy residential proxies they did not need. A five-minute test tells you which one your target requires, and it fits inside a small first top-up.
Residential proxies are billed by the gigabyte and datacenter IPs are rented by the IP, so the two are not one number against another, but residential is the dearer habit by a wide margin. A lot of people pay that premium for targets that would have accepted a datacenter IP without blinking. The pricing page has both, and it is the only page here that quotes a rate.
The reason is that every guide online says "use residential proxies for scraping", which is a bit like saying "use a van for transport". Sometimes. Often a bike is fine.
What differs
Datacenter IPs belong to hosting companies. They are fast, cheap, and easy for a website to identify: anyone can look up which ranges belong to AWS or Hetzner. Sites that care will block them wholesale.
Residential IPs belong to home broadband connections. They look like ordinary people, because they are ordinary people's connections. Slower, more expensive, and much harder for a site to refuse without also refusing real customers.
That is the whole spectrum: how suspicious the network looks, and what you pay to look less suspicious.
One difference matters before you buy. Our datacenter and ISP IPs let you choose the country, region and city. Residential rotates through the pool without a country choice, so if the job is about where you appear to be, residential is the wrong tool here.
There is a middle option too, ISP proxies: static IPs registered to consumer internet providers. ISP or datacenter covers when they are worth it.
The test
Do not reason about it. Spend a little and find out.
- Buy the minimum top-up. Run 100 requests against your actual target through datacenter, and record the status codes.
- If you get mostly 200s with real content, you are done. Use datacenter and keep the difference.
- If you get 403s, captchas, endless redirects, or 200s containing a "please verify you are human" page, the site is filtering networks. Move to residential and run the same 100.
The whole test costs one datacenter IP and, if you need it, a small residential order. It is worth more than any amount of reading, including this.
Signs you are on the wrong one
Paying for residential when datacenter would do. Your success rate on datacenter was already fine and you upgraded "to be safe". You are paying more per job for no gain.
Buying more residential when it is not working. If residential is getting blocked, more residential will also get blocked. Something else is giving you away, usually your headers, your TLS fingerprint, or your request rate. A different IP will not fix a browser fingerprint that says "Python 3.11".
That second one matters. When people tell us residential "does not work" on a target, it is more often the client than the IP. Rotate your user agent, use a real browser fingerprint, slow down, and try again before spending more.
Rough guide
| Target | Start with |
|---|---|
| Public APIs, docs, forums | Datacenter |
| Your own staging or load tests | Datacenter |
| News sites | Datacenter, then residential |
| Content locked to one country | Datacenter or ISP, targeted to that country |
| Retail, travel, marketplaces | Residential |
| Social platforms | Residential |
Prices are on the pricing page and every product comes out of the same non-expiring balance, so moving between them costs nothing extra.
Not sure where you land? Say what you are hitting in Discord. We will usually tell you to try the cheap one first.