ISP, residential or mobile: which one does your job actually need?

Most people arrive knowing they need "proxies" and not much more. The three types on offer behave very differently, and the difference is usually what decides whether a job runs cleanly or gets blocked on the second request.

ISP proxies

An ISP proxy is a dedicated address issued by a real internet provider and routed through a datacentre. You rent the address itself, which is why bandwidth is unlimited — nobody is metering a line you already pay for.

They are the right answer when:

• You are pushing sustained volume and a per-gigabyte bill would be painful
• You want the same IP for days or weeks at a time
• Speed matters more than looking like a household connection

Rotating residential

Residential draws from a large pool of real household addresses, and you are billed for the data you move rather than the addresses you touch. Every request can come from a different exit.

They are the right answer when:

• You need breadth — many addresses, many locations
• The target is sensitive to datacentre ranges
• Your volume is bursty enough that renting fixed IPs would waste money

Mobile

Mobile addresses are issued by carriers and shared by thousands of real handsets behind carrier-grade NAT. That sharing is exactly what makes them hard to act against: blocking one punishes a lot of innocent people.

They are the right answer when:

• The target has already blocked residential ranges
• You need the highest trust score available and can pay for it

A rule of thumb

Start with residential. If you get blocked, move up to mobile. If you are spending more on bandwidth than a fixed set of addresses would cost, move to ISP.