What datacenter and residential proxies are
A datacenter proxy is an IP address hosted in a data center and owned by a hosting company. These IPs are plentiful, fast, and inexpensive, but their address ranges are registered to hosting companies, which websites can look up.
A residential proxy borrows an IP assigned by an internet service provider to a real household. Because the traffic comes from a home connection, websites see a household visitor in that location. That is the main reason people pay more for residential IPs.
When to pick which
Reach for datacenter proxies when your target sites accept traffic from servers, when raw speed matters, and when budget is tight. Bulk requests to public APIs, uptime monitoring, and internal testing are good fits.
Reach for residential proxies when you need to see a site the way local home users see it: retail prices, ad verification, travel fare comparison, and market research in specific countries and cities. Here a real ISP address is worth the extra cost because the results match what local visitors get.
Residential vs datacenter at a glance
The trade-off is where the IP comes from versus price and speed.
| Datacenter | Residential | |
|---|---|---|
| IP source | Hosting company servers | Real home internet connections |
| How sites see it | Identifiable as a server | Ordinary household visitor |
| Speed | Fastest | Slightly slower |
| Nefo price | From $0.66/GB, $0.29/GB at 10 TB | From $0.90/GB, $0.53/GB at 10 TB |
| Nefo coverage | 75 countries, 1,901 cities | 227 countries and territories, 22,417 cities |
| Best for | Bulk requests to tolerant sites, public APIs, uptime checks | Local prices, ad verification, travel fares, market research |
Where Nefo fits
Nefo sells both on one account. Rotating datacenter proxies suit speed and volume on tolerant targets. Rotating residential proxies suit work that needs real home connections, with country, state, city and ISP targeting and sticky sessions up to 24 hours.
Both are prepaid, share one balance and never expire, so you can send each job to the network that suits it. Read the longer residential vs datacenter proxies article for background, or check pricing.
Frequently asked questions
Usually yes, because they sit in optimized data centers. Residential proxies add a hop through a real home connection, so latency is somewhat higher, but the gap often matters little for scraping and automation where trust matters more.
Datacenter IP ranges are registered to hosting companies and shared by many users, so websites can see that a request comes from a server rather than a home. Residential IPs belong to real ISP customers, so sites see an ordinary home connection.
No. If your target accepts server traffic, datacenter proxies give the same result for far less money. Residential is worth it when a site serves different content to home connections or you need precise local results.
Rotating datacenter proxies cost $0.66 for 1 GB, $5.70 for 10 GB and $49 for 100 GB ($0.49/GB), falling to $0.29/GB at 10 TB. They cover 75 countries and speak HTTP(S), SOCKS5 and UDP. Bandwidth never expires.
Rotating residential proxies start at $4.50 for 5 GB ($0.90/GB), fall to $0.73/GB at 100 GB and $0.53/GB at 10 TB, and cover 227 countries and territories. Bandwidth never expires and credentials are free.