Proxy Buying Guide: Residential vs Datacenter
Proxies are the least understood product on the marketplace. Buyers overpay for residential when datacenter would do, or buy datacenter and wonder why everything gets blocked. Five minutes of understanding saves real money.
The three types, honestly
| Datacenter | Residential | Mobile | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | IP from a server farm | IP from a real home connection | IP from a cell carrier |
| Speed | Fastest | Medium | Slowest, variable |
| Trust level | Lowest (flagged ranges) | High | Highest |
| Price | Cheapest | Mid | Expensive |
| Use when | Scraping tolerant sites, bulk tasks | Social accounts, sneaker/retail | Hardest blocks, app traffic |
How proxies are sold (and priced)
- Per GB (residential/mobile): you pay for bandwidth. Fine for light use; costs explode with video or heavy scraping. Always estimate your GB first.
- Per IP / per port (datacenter): flat monthly per IP. Predictable — great for stable, long-running tasks.
- Rotating vs sticky: rotating changes IP every request or few minutes (good for scraping); sticky keeps one IP for a session duration (required for logged-in account work). For account management, you want sticky. Rotating IPs on a logged-in Instagram account is asking for a verification loop.
What to check on the listing
- Country/city targeting — can you pick? Country-level is standard; city-level costs more.
- Session control — sticky duration options (10 min? 60 min?).
- Protocol — HTTP/HTTPS and SOCKS5 support. Your tool dictates this.
- Concurrent connections — how many threads at once.
- Replacement policy — dead IPs happen; good sellers replace them.
Test before you commit
Use the Online Proxy Tester in our Tools section: paste the proxy, check latency and whether the exit IP matches the promised location. Then run your actual use case on a small scale before buying in bulk. A proxy that tests fine but gets your specific target blocked is useless to you — and that's the only test that counts.
The #1 mistake
Using one proxy for 50 accounts. Platforms link accounts by IP — that's the entire point of buying multiple proxies. Budget roughly one IP per account for anything you care about, or use proper rotation with sticky sessions. The proxy is cheap; the accounts are not.