Comparisons
Datacenter vs Residential Proxies
Both proxy types do one job: route your traffic through a different IP. The difference is who owns that IP, how target sites see it, and how much it costs you.
- Cost vs Stealth
- Speed vs Trust
- Decision Guide
- Real Benchmarks
Why Picking Wrong Hurts Either Way
Overpaying for residential
Using residential when datacenter would do is leaving 6x cost on the table for traffic that nobody is checking.
Underspending on datacenter
Trying to scrape Google or Cloudflare-protected sites with datacenter IPs gets you blocked in seconds.
Mixing both badly
A poorly tuned mix burns budget on unsuccessful datacenter retries that residential would have completed once.
How to Pick the Right One
Match the proxy type to the target, not the other way around
Datacenter for speed-sensitive low-defense targets
APIs, internal tools, sites that do not check IP type: DC wins on cost and latency.
Residential for fingerprint-aware sites
Search engines, e-commerce, social media, ticketing: residential passes IP classification checks.
Hybrid for large workloads
Try datacenter first, fail-over to residential on retry. Works well when most pages are low-defense and a minority need stealth.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Property | Datacenter | Residential |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | From $2.60 per IP | From $0.65/GB |
| Speed | Fast | Varies by home connection |
| Success on Google | Low to medium | High |
| Success on Cloudflare-protected | Low | High |
| IP pool size | Smaller | Large rotating pool |
| Best for | APIs, internal tools | SERPs, e-comm, social |
How It Works
Test the target
Send 100 datacenter requests. If success rate is above 90%, datacenter is fine.
Compute true cost
Account for retry rate. A cheap IP that often fails can cost more per successful request than a residential IP that succeeds.
Pick the floor proxy type
Use the cheapest type that gets you above your acceptable success threshold.
Add fail-over
On retry, escalate to a higher-trust pool. Two tiers cover most workloads.
Key Features
DC: high bandwidth per IP
Hosted in data centers with plenty of bandwidth.
Resi: real ISP IPs
Look like real users at the IP layer.
DC: smaller pool
Smaller pool, easy to fingerprint at scale.
Resi: large rotating pool
Large enough for high-volume rotation.
Get the Right Proxy for Your Workload
Try both. Datacenter from $2.60/IP, residential from $0.65/GB. No commitment.
Switch between proxy types in your dashboard at any time.
Frequently Asked Questions
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