Proxies & Routing
Datacenter vs residential vs mobile proxy: which IP type to use
Three proxy IP types, three different cost / detection / speed tradeoffs. Datacenter is cheapest and fastest but most blockable. Residential looks like real users but is slower and pricier. Mobile rides the carrier CGNAT and is the hardest to ban. Here's how to pick — and how IPCombo helps you verify which one your traffic actually is.
| Dimension | Datacenter IP Hosted on cloud / hosting ranges, easiest to detect | Residential IP ISP-assigned to real home broadband | Mobile IP Carrier-grade NAT over 4G / 5G, hardest to ban |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | An IP leased from a cloud / hosting provider (AWS, OVH, Hetzner, …) | An IP assigned by an ISP to a real home subscriber | An IP from a mobile carrier's CGNAT pool (3G / 4G / 5G) |
| IP source | Datacenter lease — assigned to ASN of a hosting / cloud company | ISP-assigned to a home router / ONT, opted into a peer-to-peer network | Mobile carrier NAT — thousands of subscribers share a few public IPs |
| Typical ASN class | AS-CLOUD, AS-HOSTING, AS-DATACENTER | AS-ISP / residential (Comcast, Orange, NTT, …) | AS-MOBILE (Vodafone, China Mobile, Verizon, …) |
| Detection rate (ease of flagging) | Highest — IP ranges are public, free databases flag them on sight | Low — looks identical to a real home user | Lowest — IP rotates through thousands of users; banning it punishes legitimate subscribers |
| Speed / latency | Fastest (10–50ms), predictable | Moderate (100–500ms), varies by peer uplink | Slowest (200–800ms), carrier-dependent |
| Cost (relative) | $ (cheapest — $0.50–$3 / IP / mo, $0.08 / GB) | $$ ($3.50–$8 / GB rotating, $5–$15 / GB premium) | $$$ ($10–$25 / GB, $15–$50 / proxy / mo) |
| IP stability / rotation | Static by default; rotation is operator-side | Rotating pools (every request) or sticky (5–30min) | Forced rotation by carrier NAT — high churn |
| Best for (use case) | Internal testing, high-volume public-data scraping, dev / staging | Web scraping behind anti-bot, ad verification, sneaker sites, geo bypass | Brand protection, multi-account management, mobile-app scraping |
| Worst for | Anything with active bot-mitigation (Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome) | Real-time low-latency checkout (milliseconds matter) | Pure cost-volume scraping of public websites |
| How IPCombo helps verify | Surfaces AS-CLOUD / AS-HOSTING ASN inline per target | Shows ISP + residential ASN class per IP | Detects AS-MOBILE ASN + flags carrier-grade NAT behavior |
Bottom line
Default to datacenter only when detection is not the bottleneck — internal tests, large-volume public-data scraping, or dev / staging. Switch to residential the moment a target site has anti-bot (Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome) and look-alike traffic matters. Reach for mobile only when residential is already banned by the target, or when you specifically need mobile-app scraping, multi-account management on social platforms, or a 'looks like a phone' fingerprint. The single highest-leverage thing you can do is verify which class each of your exit IPs actually belongs to — run the IPCombo dashboard, eyeball the ASN column, and match the class to the job. Wrong-type proxies cost you more in ban-recovery time than they ever save in bandwidth.