The Four Proxy Types

Two requests reach a ticketing site one second apart. One comes from an IP owned by a cloud hosting company, the other from a phone on a mobile carrier. The site challenges the first and serves the second, and it made that choice before reading a single header.

Four types, one question: who owns the IP

Every public IP belongs to a network, and every network has an autonomous system number, or ASN. Comcast has ASNs. So do Amazon Web Services and T-Mobile. IP databases tag each ASN with a category such as hosting, fixed-line ISP, mobile carrier, business or education.

A website looks up the visitor's IP and gets back a line such as AS64500, Example Hosting LLC, hosting. The last word does the damage. Shoppers do not browse from server racks, so a hosting ASN suggests automation. A home broadband or carrier ASN suggests a person. The four proxy types are four answers to the same lookup, and the buyer is paying to change that one word.

The names overlap in confusing ways. ISP proxies and static residential proxies are the same product under two labels. A rotating datacenter pool and a rotating residential pool are used the same way and differ only in where the IPs come from.

The trust ladder

Sites do not treat the four types equally. The order below is the default starting position of each type on a strict website.

The ladder describes a starting point, not a result. A residential IP that hammered a site an hour ago carries that history. A clean datacenter IP works well on the many sites that run no strict bot screening. Cost climbs with trust, so the practical rule is to start at the bottom rung and climb only when blocks appear.

Account work appears in two of those rows, and it comes with a caveat. Running multiple accounts can breach a platform's terms of service, and the operator carries that risk whatever the proxy type.

How the IPs are sold

Shared, dedicated or rotating pool

The same IP type can be packaged three ways, and the package changes both price and risk.

• Shared. Several customers use the same IP at once. It is the cheapest option. The risk is a neighbor who gets the IP blocked on the very site the buyer needs.
• Dedicated. One customer holds the IP for the rental period. Its reputation on a target then depends on that customer's behavior alone.
• Rotating pool. The buyer gets no specific IPs, only a gateway that draws from a large pool. Billing is usually by traffic. Chapter 4 covers gateways.

Datacenter and ISP proxies come in all three packages. Residential and mobile proxies are almost always pools, because nobody can promise that one household's device stays online.

IPv4 or IPv6

IPv4 has about 4.3 billion addresses and the world ran out of fresh ones years ago. Every IPv4 proxy sits on an address somebody leases, which is why per-IP pricing exists. IPv6 is the opposite. A single /64 subnet holds more addresses than the whole IPv4 internet, so IPv6 proxies are cheap.

Two catches come with the low price. Websites know IPv6 addresses cost nothing, so they tend to score a whole subnet as one visitor. A thousand addresses from one /64 can count as one. The second catch is reach: a site that publishes no IPv6 address cannot be visited from one.

# Does the target accept IPv6? Ask DNS for its AAAA records.
dig AAAA example.com +short

# One or more IPv6 addresses printed: IPv6 proxies can reach it.
# Nothing printed: the site is IPv4 only. Buy IPv4 for this target.

# Repeat for every hostname the job touches, including API hosts.
dig AAAA api.example.com +short

Where residential IPs come from, and why consent matters

A residential network is built from other people's devices. Someone installs a free app on a phone, laptop or smart TV. The app includes a bandwidth-sharing component. While the device sits idle, requests from the provider's customers leave through that home connection. Sourcing follows one of three models.

1. An SDK inside third-party apps. The app shows an opt-in screen and offers something in return, such as fewer ads or a premium feature.
2. A dedicated bandwidth-sharing app. The device owner installs it on purpose and is paid for the traffic carried.
3. No real consent. Malware, hijacked routers or a clause buried in terms nobody reads. Reputable providers stay away from this, and buyers should too.

Consent matters to the buyer for practical reasons as well as ethical ones. Traffic sent through a device whose owner never agreed creates legal and reputational exposure for whoever sent it. A pool built on hijacked devices can also vanish overnight when the malware is cleaned up.

• Ask how peers are recruited, and ask to see the consent screen.
• Ask whether peers are paid or compensated, and how they opt out.
• Ask whether the provider vets its own customers and blocks abusive use.
• Treat a vague or missing answer as the answer.

What each type costs

Proxies are billed in several units: per GB, per IP, per port or thread, per request, or as flat daily and monthly plans. The two common ones are per GB for rotating pools and per IP for static addresses.

Treat the table as orientation only. Live figures for each provider sit on the ProxyLook pricing page. The billing unit matters as much as the number. Per-GB plans punish heavy pages full of images and video. Per-IP plans reward heavy traffic through a few addresses.

A quick estimate prevents surprises. A job that fetches 100,000 pages at 2 MB each moves about 200 GB. Blocking images, fonts and video in the scraper cuts that figure, and the bill, directly. Put the monthly total in GB into the cost calculator before choosing a plan. Scraper APIs and unblockers sit outside the table. They are priced per successful request or per monthly plan, and the live pages carry the figures.

Checking what an IP really is

A label on a pricing page is a claim. An ASN lookup is evidence. Verifying a new proxy takes a few minutes with two free ProxyLook tools.

1. Find the exit IP. Set a browser to use the proxy and open What Is My IP. It shows the public IP, location, ISP and ASN that websites see.
2. Look up the network type. Paste the IP into the proxy checker. It returns the country, ASN, ISP and a network type of residential, datacenter or mobile.
3. Compare with the order. An ISP proxy whose ASN comes back as hosting is a datacenter proxy to any site using similar data.
4. Sample more than one. Check several IPs from a static list, or several fresh sessions from a rotating pool, at different times of day.