Datacenter vs Residential Proxies: Price, Detection and Which to Buy

Datacenter and residential proxies both put another IP in front of yours. What differs is who owns that other IP. A datacenter IP belongs to a hosting firm. The large cloud firms even publish lists of their own, 185.2 million IPv4 addresses on October 22, 2026. A residential IP belongs to an internet provider's home customer, so it passes as an ordinary visitor. The owner also sets the price. At five of seven sellers we read that day, residential traffic cost 2 to 13 times as much as datacenter traffic. We sell both kinds, so weigh our view with that in mind.

What is the difference between datacenter and residential proxies?

Datacenter proxies use IPs owned by hosting firms: cheap, quick to hand out and easy for a website to spot. Residential proxies use IPs that internet providers give to homes, so they pass as ordinary visitors and cost more per gigabyte. The rest of this page puts numbers on both sides of that trade.

Where does each kind of IP come from?

Every IP sits inside an autonomous system. RFC 1930 defines one as "a connected group of one or more IP prefixes" with one routing policy. Each system has a public number, the ASN, and a public owner. That owner is what separates the two kinds of proxy.

A datacenter proxy sends your traffic out from a server in a hosting network. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OVH and Hetzner run such networks. Proxy firms rent blocks of IPs there and at smaller hosts. Many sellers rent these IPs one at a time for a monthly fee.

A residential proxy sends your traffic out through a home internet line. The IP belongs to a consumer provider such as Comcast, BT or Deutsche Telekom. A website sees that provider and its city. The seller has to reach those home lines and pay for the traffic. PacketStream, one of the few sellers that prints both sides, runs a desktop app on people's computers. It charges buyers $1 per GB and pays the app's users $0.10 for each GB their line carries. That cost is one reason free residential proxies deserve doubt.

How does a website tell them apart?

It can look up who owns the IP before it reads anything else in the request. For server IPs, the cloud firms make that easy. AWS publishes its ranges as a file. Its documentation says the file is there so that "you can identify traffic from AWS". Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, DigitalOcean and Linode publish similar files. We downloaded all six on October 22, 2026 and counted the IPv4 addresses in each.

Together the six lists hold 185.2 million IPv4 addresses, 4.3% of all IPv4. A site can load them in one step and treat every IP on them as a server. Hosts that publish no list, such as OVH and Hetzner, are still easy to spot, because their network numbers are public.

Our free IP lookup runs the same check any site can run. We put one IP from each of six networks through it on October 22, 2026:

The Amazon and Google IPs we used sit on their owners' published lists. OVH has no list, and its network gave its IP away all the same. Paste a proxy into our proxy checker and it gives the same verdict for the IP a target would see.

Sites without a list of their own buy one. MaxMind, a large IP data firm, sets an is_hosting_provider flag on hosting IPs. Defenders treat server IPs as the easy case. Cloudflare wrote in 2024 that "data center IP addresses" are among the simplest IP reputation signals. In the same post it noted that bot operators had started favoring residential address space.

Why are residential proxies harder to block?

A home IP carries real people. Cloudflare looked at IPs that were active as residential proxies over 24 hours. In its words, "4 out of 5 requests" from them came straight from the homes' own devices. Blocking such an IP turns away four real visitors for each proxied request.

Residential proxies can still be caught. MaxMind keeps a second flag for them, is_residential_proxy. By its own description, that flag leaves out peer-to-peer proxy IPs. Cloudflare built a model that judges each request instead of each IP. It was classifying more than 17 million residential proxy IPs every hour. The IP is only the first signal. Our guide to how websites detect proxies covers the headers, TLS fingerprints and timing that come after it.

What do datacenter and residential proxies cost?

Datacenter traffic costs less at most sellers that sell both. Thirteen sellers in our residential price study also sell datacenter traffic by the gigabyte. On October 22, 2026, seven of them printed both prices for 10 GB on their own pages.

The median seller charged 2.2 times as much for residential traffic. Bright Data's $8.00 is its list price, and a coupon on its page halves it. Two sellers turn the rule around. IPOasis charged $5.00 per GB for datacenter traffic and $2.90 for residential, and Rainproxy $2.50 against $0.60. Check both price lists before you assume which kind is cheaper.

Many sellers also rent datacenter IPs one at a time. In our records of September 26 to October 14, 2026, one dedicated datacenter IPv4 address cost $1.00 to $4.90 a month at 20 sellers. The median was $1.77. Ours costs $1.58 a month, with no traffic metering. Our datacenter price table also sells IPv4 traffic by the gigabyte. Per-IP plans are where our traffic is unmetered.

The two meters suit different jobs. Take a job that moves 100 GB a month:

• As datacenter traffic at the seven-seller median of $0.60 per GB, it costs $60.
• As residential traffic at the 100 GB median of 55 sellers, $2.00 per GB, it costs $200.
• Through ten dedicated datacenter IPs at the $1.77 median, it costs $17.70, if the plan leaves traffic unmetered.

Per-GB billing suits the opposite job: light traffic spread over thousands of home IPs, where renting each IP would cost more. Our Residential Lite costs $0.50 per GB for one GB, down to $0.44 per GB at 2,000 GB+, on our residential pricing page.

Where do ISP proxies fit?

An ISP proxy sits between the two. The server stands in a data center, but its IP is registered to an internet provider. A lookup therefore shows that provider instead of a host. It is sold per IP, like a datacenter proxy, and it keeps one address for as long as you hold it. That suits logins and accounts that must look like the same visitor every day.

Our ISP proxies come two ways. A dedicated static IP costs $2.70 a month, with unmetered traffic. A rotating pool is billed per gigabyte. What is an ISP proxy covers the type in full. Rotating vs static residential proxies weighs one fixed IP against a rotating pool. ISP vs residential proxies puts both on one price table, and the best ISP proxies lists eleven sellers. Carrier addresses, the third kind, have their own match-up in mobile vs residential proxies, and what a residential IP address is explains how lookups label each one.

Which one should you buy?

Start on datacenter and make the target prove it needs more. The loser in this match-up is residential traffic bought for a site that never checks the network. At the median seller above, it costs 2.2 times as much for the same pages. On a site that turns away hosting networks, the cheap option loses instead, because each blocked request still costs money.

Then test before you scale:

1. Buy a small datacenter plan and send real requests to your target.
2. Read the page that comes back, since a block or challenge page can arrive with status 200.
3. Move only the requests that fail to residential, and keep the rest on datacenter.
4. Compare the cost per page you actually got, retries included.

One HProxy balance pays for every product, so a mixed setup needs one account and one top-up. Every rate is on our pricing page. Survey work has its own guide: proxies for surveys.

What this page could not check

• No success rates. We measured no block rate, success rate or speed on any site, for any seller, ours included. Which kind works on a site has to be tested on that site.
• Seven sellers. Only seven of the 13 printed both prices for 10 GB in their page text on October 22, 2026. IPOasis and NSTData show their rates as discounts from a higher price.
• Older records. The dedicated IPv4 prices come from our records of September 26 to October 14, 2026.
• Incomplete lists. AWS says its file covers the services customers commonly use. DigitalOcean's file carries no date, and OVH and Hetzner publish no list.
• One day of traffic. Cloudflare's four-in-five figure comes from one 24-hour period in 2024.
• Check by January 22, 2027. Prices and lists change, so every number here needs a fresh read by then.

Sources

• Cloudflare, "Using machine learning to detect bot attacks that leverage residential proxies", June 24, 2024.
• Amazon Web Services, "AWS IP address ranges" (Amazon VPC User Guide) and ip-ranges.json, downloaded October 22, 2026.
• Google Cloud, Compute Engine FAQ and cloud.json (created October 21, 2026), downloaded October 22, 2026.
• Microsoft, Azure IP Ranges and Service Tags, public cloud file of October 19, 2026.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, public_ip_ranges.json (updated August 25, 2026); DigitalOcean, published IP list; Linode, geofeed (October 21, 2026); all downloaded October 22, 2026.
• MaxMind, GeoIP Anonymous IP database and web services documentation, read October 22, 2026.
• IETF, RFC 1930, "Guidelines for creation, selection, and registration of an Autonomous System (AS)", March 1996.
• Bright Data, Decodo, IPOasis, DataImpulse, NSTData, Evomi and Rainproxy, datacenter and residential pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
• PacketStream, home and pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
• HProxy price records for dedicated datacenter IPv4 at 20 sellers, September 26 to October 14, 2026; HProxy residential price study, October 22, 2026; HProxy IP lookup, six networks, October 22, 2026.