Datacenter vs residential proxies: which fits the target

Originally published on proxymint.

Datacenter vs residential proxies compared on ASN, speed, location and billing model, with a 100,000-request job sized in GB and a test to pick per target.

TL;DR

• The ASN is the difference the target sees first. A datacenter IP is announced by a hosting company, often from published ranges; a residential IP is announced by a consumer ISP on a real home connection.
• Test the target before picking a tier. A sample of a few hundred requests at the real pace shows whether the target serves normally, blocks, challenges or serves different content.
• Residential is usage-based, so page weight sets the traffic. 100,000 HTML-only requests at 22 KB move 2.2 GB; the same requests as full 2,164 KB renders move 216.4 GB.
• Datacenter fits repeating or heavy jobs on lenient targets. A dedicated IPv4 port is billed per month with no bandwidth cap under normal use, so pace sets the limit rather than GB.
• Datacenter is usually faster, but measure it. Server uplinks beat home lines on latency, while residential latency varies by exit; compare p50 and p95 time to first byte on the real target.

Key takeaways

• Sample every new target on datacenter first. Sort the responses into serves normally, blocks, challenges or serves different content, and let that decide the tier.
• Spot-check datacenter data against a home connection. A 200 status with different prices or rankings is silent bad data, and it is the one failure that looks like success.
• Count valid records, not requests. Only responses whose content matches the home control count toward the job.
• Rule out the client before blaming the proxy. Run the same requests at the same pace from a home network with no proxy; if they are challenged there too, a better IP will not help.
• Route per target, not per company. Datacenter for lenient targets, residential for targets that block hosting ranges, static ISP when one address must hold for days, mobile only where a mobile origin is required.

Read the full guide on proxymint, with the commands, tables and sources.