How it works
Proxy Types Compared: Residential, Datacenter, Mobile and Premium (2026)
Every article on proxy types says the same thing: residential are real people, datacenter are fast and cheap, mobile are the most trusted. All true, and no decision follows from it. Here are the numbers instead — what it is in megabits, where a twenty-seven-fold spread between two neighbouring exits of one pool comes from, and why the price gap across types is tenfold.
Where the address comes from
- Datacenter. Addresses of server facilities. Plenty of them, fast and cheap — and the network number gives them away; a site that cares recognises one instantly.
- Residential. Addresses of home internet providers handed to ordinary subscribers. To the site it looks like a person in a city rather than a server.
- Mobile. Carrier addresses. Thousands of subscribers sit behind one of them at once, so blocking it wholesale is expensive — hence the highest level of trust.
- Premium residential. The same kind with a stricter pool: fewer addresses with a history of abuse, more that have never been flagged.
Speed: the central misunderstanding
A residential proxy is somebody's home internet, and the ceiling is that subscriber's line, not your plan. Measured on 24 August 2026 through a residential exit in Armenia on a home ISP: 5.4–7.2 Mbit/s single-threaded. Not the gigabit people expect after reading “1 Gbps” in a plan description — that gigabit belongs to the gateway port.
Single-threaded is the wrong question, though. The same access across six parallel threads produced 17.7 Mbit/s, three times more. Throughput in residential networks is accumulated by concurrency, and the plan limit is expressed in simultaneous connections rather than megabits. Plan the load in requests per minute.
Rotation and sticky sessions
How the address behaves depends on the port more than on the pool type. On a rotating port the address changes on every request — ideal for collecting data, fatal for anything with a session: signing in, a cart, a multi-step form. On sticky ports the address holds: three consecutive requests in the test returned the same one.
Geo targeting and the tenfold price gap
The country is chosen by appending to the login; the password and gateway stay the same. In testing __cr.de returned Germany, and narrowing to a state returned Phoenix, Arizona on Cox Communications — an actual cable operator. The finer the filter, the fewer exits remain and the higher the chance of drawing a slow one.
The price difference is wholesale cost, not markup. One sold gigabyte draws 0.5 from the wholesale balance for datacenter, 1 for residential, 2 for mobile and 5 for premium residential. The tenfold gap between the extremes comes from exactly there.
Choosing in a minute
- The site does not check where the request came from — datacenter: twice as fast per thread and half the price.
- It checks and answers with a captcha — residential.
- It challenges even a residential address — mobile, remembering the ×2 coefficient.
- You need the cleanest address available and price is secondary — premium residential.
- You need a session — a sticky port, any type. You need speed — threads, not a type.
There is no universal answer: it depends on what your target site actually checks. The cheapest way to find out is to buy the smallest volume of the line you suspect and run it against your own targets — prices and volumes per line are in our proxy shop, Proxys Store.
FAQ
What is the difference between residential and datacenter proxies?
Where the address comes from. A residential address belongs to a home internet provider and looks like an ordinary subscriber; a datacenter one belongs to a server facility and its network number shows it. The practical gap is roughly two-to-one in both single-thread speed and price.
Why are mobile proxies more expensive?
A gigabyte of mobile draws four times as much from the wholesale balance as a datacenter one. That is the purchase cost every reseller pays, not a seller's markup — you are paying for the fact that thousands of real subscribers share one carrier address.
What is a sticky session and when do I need one?
A mode where the address stays with you while requests keep coming, instead of rotating on each. Required wherever the site must see one visitor: signing in, a cart, a multi-step form. It is set by the port, not by the proxy type.
How fast is a residential proxy?
Measured on 24 August 2026: 5.4–7.2 Mbit/s single-threaded and 17.7 Mbit/s across six parallel threads. The ceiling is the home line of the particular exit, which is why the spread between addresses in one pool reaches twenty-seven times.
How do I choose the proxy country?
By appending a two-letter country code to the login; the password and gateway address stay unchanged. City, state, ASN and postcode filters exist too, but each one shrinks the pool.
Read next: mobile proxies and when they are worth it, datacenter or residential.
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