Mobile, residential and datacentre proxies — what actually differs
The three proxy families differ in where their IP addresses are registered, how many real users share them, and how websites score them. A practical comparison, with a decision table.
On this page
"Which proxy should I buy?" is the question we answer most often. The honest answer depends less on marketing labels than on three technical facts: who owns the IP range, how many real users share each address, and how the target website scores that range. This guide walks through each proxy family with those three facts in mind.
Datacentre proxies
A datacentre proxy is a server in a hosting facility with an IP address from the hosting provider's range. The range is registered (in the RIPE database for Europe) to a company like a cloud or colocation provider, and every IP-intelligence database classifies it as "hosting".
Strengths
- Cheap and plentiful: a provider can add thousands of addresses in a day.
- Fast and stable: gigabit uplinks, low latency, no consumer connection in the path.
- Predictable: the address does not change unless you ask.
Weaknesses
- Trivial to identify. A website only has to look up the autonomous system (ASN) to know that the visitor is not a household or a phone.
- Low tolerance. Many sites apply stricter rate limits, CAPTCHAs or outright blocks to hosting ranges, because real customers rarely browse from a server.
Datacentre IPs are perfectly fine for targets that do not care — public APIs, your own infrastructure, uptime monitoring, many B2B sites — and they are the most cost-effective option there.
Residential proxies
A residential proxy routes your request through a connection that an Internet service provider assigned to a household: DSL, cable or fibre. The IP belongs to a consumer ISP's range, so IP-intelligence databases classify it as "residential".
Strengths
- The address looks like an ordinary home user, because it is one.
- Huge pools are possible, which allows broad geographic coverage, down to city level.
- Per-request rotation is natural: each request can exit from a different household.
Weaknesses
- Each address is used by a small number of people. If a residential IP misbehaves, a website can block it without hurting many legitimate users.
- Quality depends entirely on sourcing. Ask any provider how peers join the network and whether they knowingly consented. Pools built from SDKs hidden in free apps exist, and they carry both ethical and practical problems (unstable peers, sudden pool shrinkage when app stores react).
- Speed varies with the peer's connection and whether the device is in use.
Residential proxies are the usual choice for broad, geographically distributed collection: price monitoring across many cities, search result checks, ad verification.
Mobile proxies
A mobile proxy routes your traffic through a 4G or 5G modem with a SIM card on a mobile carrier. The address comes from the carrier's own range.
The key difference is carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT). Mobile operators do not have enough IPv4 addresses to give each phone its own, so they put many subscribers — often hundreds or thousands — behind each public IP at any given time. From a website's point of view, one mobile IP represents a crowd of real people.
Strengths
- Very high tolerance. Blocking a mobile IP means blocking every real customer behind it, so websites are reluctant to do it and usually rely on other signals instead.
- On-demand rotation: reconnecting the modem gives you a fresh address from the carrier pool in seconds.
- Dedicated hardware: with a dedicated modem, you are the only customer sending traffic through that SIM.
Weaknesses
- Cost: each proxy is a physical modem, SIM and data plan.
- Throughput is that of a mobile connection — good, but not a datacentre uplink.
- Geographic precision is limited to the country and carrier; mobile IPs are not reliably tied to a city.
Mobile proxies make sense for the hardest targets: social platforms, marketplaces with aggressive bot detection, account management where every block is expensive.
Side-by-side
| Datacentre | Residential | Mobile | |
|---|---|---|---|
| IP registered to | Hosting provider | Consumer ISP | Mobile carrier |
| Real users per IP | None | One household | Hundreds to thousands (CGNAT) |
| Typical detection risk | High | Low to medium | Lowest |
| Geo targeting | Data-centre location | Country, city | Country, carrier |
| Rotation | Change server | Per request or session | Reconnect modem |
| Billing model | Per IP | Per GB | Per modem and period |
| Throughput | Highest | Variable | Mobile network |
How to choose
Start from the target, not the product:
- Does the target treat hosting ranges differently? Make 50 requests from a datacentre IP at a human pace. If you get through cleanly, you do not need anything more expensive.
- Do you need many locations or many identities? If you need city-level coverage or thousands of distinct addresses per hour, residential traffic billed per GB is usually the most economical option.
- Is each block expensive? If you manage logged-in accounts, run long sessions or face strict anti-bot systems, a dedicated mobile IP pays for itself in fewer failures.
Many teams end up combining types: datacentre for the easy 70 % of targets, residential for broad geographic collection, and a handful of dedicated mobile proxies for the accounts and platforms that matter most.
A note on "dedicated"
The word is used loosely in this market. For a mobile proxy, ask the provider directly: is one physical modem assigned to me alone for the whole plan? If several customers share a modem, a rotation triggered by someone else will cut your connections and change your IP mid-session. Ours are one modem per proxy, and we show the carrier and the current IP for each one.
The mobile proxies documentation explains ports, protocols and rotation in detail if you want to test one against your own target.