ISP vs Datacenter vs Residential vs Mobile Proxies: Which to Choose?

Every proxy hides your IP address. What sets them apart is where the address they lend you comes from: a hosting company, someone's home connection, a consumer ISP or a mobile network. That origin shapes almost everything else: speed, stability, how websites perceive you and how you are billed. Here are the four families, a table to compare them and a guide to choose based on what you actually need to do.

The four proxy families

Datacenter

Datacenter IPs belong to hosting and cloud companies. They run on servers with very fast connections and are available in large quantities at a low cost. Their weak spot is that their origin is public knowledge. IP databases file these ranges under “hosting”, and many websites respond to that traffic with stricter filtering, extra checks or an outright block.

Residential

Residential IPs come from real home connections, supplied by people's devices that take part in a proxy network. Before choosing such a network, find out how those people's consent is obtained. These addresses are highly credible and cover many countries and cities. The trade-off: they usually rotate and are shared among the network's customers. Their speed depends on the home line behind them, the address disappears when the device goes offline, and billing is typically based on data volume.

ISP

An ISP proxy uses an IP registered to a consumer internet provider but hosted in a data center. It combines the reputation of a subscriber connection with the speed of a server. The address is static and can be dedicated to a single customer. Its limits: no automatic rotation, and narrower geographic coverage than residential. Our guide what is an ISP proxy? covers it in detail.

Mobile 4G

A mobile proxy exits through a mobile carrier's network, via a modem or a phone fitted with a SIM card. On these networks, a single public IPv4 address is usually shared by many subscribers at once, thanks to CGNAT (carrier-grade network address translation). Hence a distinctive reputation: blocking a mobile IP risks blocking many legitimate users, so platforms tend to be more cautious about it. That is a tendency, not a guarantee.

To change addresses, the modem re-attaches to the network: it disconnects, reconnects, and the carrier assigns it a new IP. This takes around twenty seconds, during which open connections drop. Speed and stability depend on radio coverage and network load, so they vary more than in a data center. Finally, a mobile line costs more to run (hardware, subscription, data), which is why this is usually the most expensive of the four families.

The comparison at a glance

No family is best across the board. The right one is the family whose weaknesses do not get in your way: residential rotation is an asset for collecting data without logging in, and a problem for an account that needs to keep the same address.

Dedicated or shared: the other criterion

The IP type is not the whole story: you also need to know whether the IP is reserved for you. A dedicated IP is used by you alone for the entire rental. A shared IP is used by other customers at the same time, and you inherit their reputation and any blocks they trigger.

• Datacenter and ISP come in both versions: for serious work, go dedicated.
• Rotating residential is shared by nature: addresses move from one customer of the network to the next.
• Mobile is shared too, in its own way: even on a line reserved for a single customer, CGNAT shares the public IP among subscribers.

We go deeper in dedicated vs shared proxy: what really changes.

Which proxy for which use?

• Large-scale scraping: a rotating residential network for sites that filter heavily, datacenter for tolerant sources and public data. Either way, respect robots.txt, terms of service and the GDPR, and keep a reasonable pace. See our guide to proxies for web scraping.
• Account management, whether the accounts are yours or your clients': dedicated ISP proxies, one fixed IP per account, in the account's country. An account that logs in from the same address every day looks more natural than one that changes address every session.
• Local SEO and rank tracking: ISP proxies in the target country, for regular readings you can compare from one day to the next; residential if you need city-level precision. See our guide to proxies for SEO rank tracking.
• Ad verification and e-commerce monitoring: ISP for regular checks from a given country, residential to multiply vantage points.
• When you need a mobile IP: an app or service built for mobile, checking how content renders on a mobile network, or a platform that treats mobile connections differently. Only a mobile 4G IP does the job. See our guide to mobile 4G proxies, rotating or sticky IP.

What Airproxy offers

Airproxy covers two of these four families:

• Dedicated ISP proxies in France, Spain and Europe (the EU offer, which covers several countries): static IPs sourced and tested before sale, one IP per customer, HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 on the same access, a renewable 30-day rental and instant delivery after payment.
• A mobile 4G IP rented by the month: a French 4G line reserved for one customer at a time, unlimited data and unlimited IP changes via a button or an API, over HTTP and SOCKS5. Each rotation is a radio re-attachment that takes around twenty seconds, with a minimum delay between two rotations.

Since the mobile line has only one tenant at a time, its availability is shown live on the offers page, alongside current pricing. Before putting a proxy into production, you can check it with our free proxy checker.