Datacenter vs Residential Proxies, and Which One Should You Choose?

SpeedProxies Blog
5 min readApr 3, 2021

Any kinds of proxies help you to get access to the online information anonymously. This is so obvious to raise a question on your mind that, If any proxies help to hide the user’s information, then why different people demand different proxies like datacenter proxies or residential proxies?

In a simple answer, not all the users’ objectives are the same. Some users want to get access to the restricted websites like Netflix, Youtube, adult websites.

Some users want to keep their real IP confidential so that browsed websites cannot get any user’s footprint.

Let me clarify a little bit more about the proxies so that you can choose the perfect one for you.

There are two main proxies are available in the market one is datacenter proxies, and another one is residential proxies.

What are Datacenter Proxies?

Datacenter proxies are completely separate from your home IP or IP provided by your local Internet service provider(ISP). Datacenter proxies serve protection from the cloud servers by the secondary companies.

These datacenter proxies let you access the blocked content from another geo-location and keeps your personal data secrets from any cookies tracker.

Anyway, don’t be so happy to hear all of these because these days, the target websites are much smarter than you think.

They are using smart AI (Artificial Intelligence) to detect proxies and block them immediately. Even some websites pre-block all the datacenter proxies.

Though several popular companies provide completely private proxies that are not flagged by the target websites but, the price would be a bit expensive.

What are Residential Proxies?

Residential proxies are the most secure proxies provided by the Internet Service Provider or ISP to you as a homeowner. That means your IP will be masked with the real IP of a real place. Wherever location you will get shifted, you will always get a real IP by the ISP.

As a result, the targeted website detects your IP as a real user and location so, it will be impossible to flag your IP from accessing the protected content and scraping big data from the web.

Difference between Datacenter and Residential Proxies:

Probably you got a rough idea about both of the proxies by reading the definition. Now, let me tell you the main distinctions between them to narrow your buying decision.

Residential Proxies:

Protection:

Residential proxies are the real IP and much legitimate than the datacenter proxies. That’s why residential proxies provide you uninterrupted and secure data access experience.

On the flip side, datacenter proxies serve from the datacenter. So, you are not welcome to expect flawless access to online information by datacenter proxies.

Protection: Compare to datacenter proxies, you will get much-secured data accessibility through residential proxies because of its real masked IP protection.

Speed:

Residential proxies have less speed than the datacenter proxies as the datacenter proxies perform faster from the cloud server.

But keep in mind that if you want to work faster, then the chance of getting IP blocked would be increase. Anyway, if you need to do work faster, then datacenter proxies would be a good fit for you.

Pricing:

Datacenter proxies are much cheaper because the provider creates bulk IP, so the operating costs are cheaper where residential proxy providers provide real IP to every user, as the operation cost higher for the residential proxy providers they charge higher prices to customers.

Reliability:

When choosing the most reliable proxies, I would suggest you choose residential proxies blindly. The targeted websites cannot find out flagged residential proxies as it detects as a real physical location.

Consequently, it allows you to scrape data without any interruptions where datacenter proxies get detected as a fake IP and flagged anytime easily.

Individuality: As you know that, datacenter proxy providers create bulk proxies, hence they don’t have individuality. On the opposite side, a residential proxy belongs to a single user. So, residential proxies are unique.

Which proxies should you choose?

Comparing all the advantages and disadvantages now, let’s come to the main point, which proxy should you choose?

The main differences between both of the proxies are speed, legitimacy, and security.

As residential proxies are mostly undetectable by the target websites, that’s the reason people usually use them for harvesting big amounts of data. Residential proxies shield you from leaving any footprints on the internet.

By residential proxies, you will get the exact benefits like the resident of that country are getting. For example, if you want to access data from the United States, you need to buy American proxies, and then your and an American citizen’s data access capability would be the same.

Therefore, datacenter proxies are ideal for accessing geo-based blocked content and browse content anonymously. However, if you have good technical knowledge, then you may not need residential proxies as well as you will get faster browsing with datacenter proxies.

Wrapping up both residential and datacenter proxies serves your objective. Still, I will recommend residential proxies to avoid account suspension. Datacenter proxies also work fines if you can buy datacenter proxies from a good proxy provider like speed proxies.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why do I need proxies?

This is one of the most asked question by our new customers. You may be thinking, you already have a real IP address provided by your ISP, then why do you need another IP?

Firstly, you cannot access all the data all around the world from the country you are living in right now. Some of the websites blocks unwanted country’s IPs from accessing their important data.

Another reason is when you start collecting data on a small scale, you might not need any premium proxies, but when you are gonna harvest data on a big scale, you may face trouble for not having proxies.

Should I choose selected country proxies or choose proxies randomly?

Absolutely you should choose proxies for the selected location. Buying proxies for a selected location will give you faster data scraping capability because the more you near the targeted location, the more speed you will get.

Another way, buying IPs of random location won’t give you the guarantee of getting full access to the target data.

Why my datacenter proxies get flagged?

Datacenter proxies are easy to detect for giant sites if you are not able to get complete private proxies.

Most probably you bought the proxies from an unreliable proxy provider who does not provides complete private datacenter proxies.

If you are looking for proxies that are completely private and give you break free scraping facility then visit https://speedproxies.net/ to get the best proxies experience ever.

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