Types of Proxies: Residential, Datacenter, ISP and Mobile

The IP type decides how a website sees your traffic; everything else (protocol, rotation) is a setting.

The four names are industry terms, not a standard. For neutral background, see the FIRST NetSec SIG's proxy taxonomy, which has a section on IP proxy types and categories and was written "to establish shared terminology for discussing IP proxy technologies" for network operators and abuse teams, and the NDSS 2021 paper Your Phone is My Proxy: Detecting and Understanding Mobile Proxy Networks (Mi et al.), which studies residential proxy services whose exit peers are often mobile devices.

Check the type of any proxy IP in two requests. Ask which IP the proxy exits from, then look up its network owner:

curl -x gate.proxyfield.io:7000 -U "<login>-country-us-city-new_york:<password>" https://api.ipify.org
curl "https://api.ipinfo.io/lite/<exit-ip>?token=$TOKEN"

The second reply carries asn, as_name and as_domain (IPinfo developer docs). Read as_name: a broadband provider means a residential or ISP IP, a mobile carrier means a mobile IP, and a hosting or cloud company means a datacenter IP. Run the first command a few times: a rotating pool returns a new IP each time, a static or ISP IP the same one.

Two axes, not one: the network type says whose IP it is; static or rotating says how it changes. Most types can be sold either way (a sticky residential session, a rotating datacenter pool), so choose the two separately.

A website learns the network of every IP that connects, from public routing data: the autonomous system number (ASN) tells it whether the address belongs to a broadband provider, a carrier or a hosting company. An autonomous system is a group of IP prefixes run by one or more network operators under one routing policy (RFC 1930), and its number and owner are public in the regional internet registries' WHOIS records. That one fact explains most of the differences below.

"Types of proxies" also has a networking sense, about whom the proxy works for and what it tells the site. Every proxy a provider sells is a forward proxy; the IP type above is chosen on top of that.

What the site receives from each, for a visitor at 203.0.113.7 behind a proxy:

Transparent:  X-Forwarded-For: 203.0.113.7
              Via: 1.1 proxy.example
Anonymous:    Via: 1.1 proxy.example
Elite:        (neither header; the site sees only the proxy's IP)

The headers are standard: X-Forwarded-For and Via are described in MDN's Proxy servers and tunneling guide, and Forwarded is defined in RFC 7239. HTTPS through a forward proxy goes through a CONNECT tunnel (RFC 9110, section 9.3.6), so the proxy carries the encrypted bytes without reading them. ProxyField's gateway adds no Via, X-Forwarded-For or Forwarded header, and HTTPS goes through a CONNECT tunnel and is not decrypted. More: what is a proxy server, transparent proxy, anonymity levels, elite proxies.

Sources: RFC 1930 (autonomous systems), RFC 6888 (carrier-grade NAT), RFC 7239 (Forwarded), RFC 9110 §9.3.6 (CONNECT), MDN: Proxy servers and tunneling (X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Host, X-Forwarded-Proto, Via, PAC files).

A residential proxy is a proxy that sends your requests out through IP addresses that home internet providers assign to their customers, so a website sees an ordinary home connection. The provider runs a gateway; you connect to it once, and it picks an IP for each request (rotating) or keeps one for a set time (sticky).

• Strengths: many IPs in many places, city-level targeting, few blocks on sites that distrust server traffic.
• Limits: slower than datacenter IPs, priced per GB, and a single home IP can drop off when its connection changes.
• ProxyField: 412M+ residential IPs in 195+ countries and 21,000+ cities, targeting by country, region and city (all 50 US states), a new IP per request or sticky sessions from 30 seconds to 36 hours. $2.95/GB for 1 GB down to $1.95/GB from 1,000 GB, and the traffic never expires. See residential proxies and rotating proxies.

A mobile proxy sends your requests through IPs of mobile carrier networks. Carriers put many phones behind each public IP with carrier-grade NAT (RFC 6888), so one mobile IP is used by many real people at once, and websites are slow to block it.

• Strengths: traffic that looks like a phone user's, for mobile apps, mobile ads and social platforms.
• Limits: the most expensive per GB, and slower responses: under 1.5 s typical for mobile against under 1 s for residential, according to our service data.
• ProxyField: 10.2M+ mobile IPs on 5G, 4G and LTE carrier networks, with the same protocols, targeting and sessions as residential, from one balance. $3.45/GB for 1 GB down to $2.45/GB from 1,000 GB. See mobile proxies and mobile vs residential proxies.

A datacenter proxy uses IP addresses that belong to a hosting or cloud company, not to an internet provider's customers. The servers sit in data centers with fast links, so these proxies are quick and cheap, but any site that checks the network sees server traffic, and IPs often come in neighboring ranges that can be blocked together.

• Strengths: speed, low price, stable connections.
• Limits: blocked first by sites with bot protection.
• ProxyField: rotating datacenter proxies at $0.29/GB (1–49 GB) down to $0.22/GB from 1,000 GB, traffic never expires; dedicated datacenter IPv4 at $1.39 per IP for 30 days, one price for any quantity. Rotating datacenter proxies cover the same countries as residential; dedicated IPv4 comes in the countries its order form lists, which follow stock. Rotating datacenter proxies are targeted by country only. See datacenter proxies and residential vs datacenter proxies.

An ISP proxy is one fixed IP address registered to an internet provider, rented to you alone for a term. It looks like a home connection, like a residential IP, but it does not change, like a datacenter IP.

• Strengths: the same trusted IP for weeks, for logins, allowlists and accounts.
• Limits: one IP per purchase, no rotation, and a monthly cost whether you use it or not.
• ProxyField: dedicated ISP IPs from $2.29 per IP for 30 days, one price for any quantity; you renew in your dashboard, nothing renews automatically. Each dedicated ISP IP has unlimited traffic. ISP proxies come in the countries their order form lists, which follow stock (in November 2026: the United States, Austria, Turkey, Czechia, Moldova and Ukraine). See ISP proxies and ISP vs residential proxies.

Besides the IP type and the direction, proxies are described by 4 more properties, and every proxy has one value of each.

Two more terms come up when you buy: a proxy pool is the set of IPs a gateway rotates through (what is a proxy pool), and proxy chaining sends traffic through several proxies in a row (proxy chaining).

Match the type to how strict the target is and how long one IP must stay the same.

• Many pages, a new IP each time, protected sites → residential, rotating.
• Mobile apps, mobile ads, social platforms → mobile.
• Speed and volume on sites that accept server traffic → rotating datacenter.
• One account or login on one IP for weeks → ISP, or dedicated datacenter where the site allows it.
• A non-web app or a tool that only speaks SOCKS → a proxy over SOCKS5.

These are the usual fits, not rules: test on your own targets before you buy in volume. ProxyField's pool is clean for Google, checked and segmented, and it runs at a 99.6% success rate, according to our service data.

For a small business that sends its own requests from other IPs, start here:

But first decide which of three jobs you mean; a reverse proxy for your own website or a staff web gateway is a different product, and ProxyField does not sell it:

• Protect or speed up your own website → a reverse proxy or a CDN, which sits in front of your servers (Cloudflare's explainer). ProxyField does not sell this.
• Filter or monitor your staff's web traffic → a secure web gateway or a managed forward proxy for the office, the kind of policy-enforcing gateway NIST describes in SP 800-41 Rev. 1, Guidelines on Firewalls and Firewall Policy. Ask its vendor for URL and category filtering, HTTPS inspection rules, per-user logs and how it is set on office devices. ProxyField does not sell this either.
• Send your own requests from other IPs and locations (data collection, price and SERP monitoring, ad checks, regional testing, your own accounts) → the proxy types on this page. This is what ProxyField sells: it sends your requests out through IPs of home providers, carriers and data centers.

Short answer, for the third job: rotating residential (1 GB for $2.95) for data work; for one stable IP, a dedicated datacenter IPv4 at $1.39 or a dedicated ISP IP from $2.29 per IP for 30 days, in the countries their order form lists. At ProxyField you pay in crypto, access opens once the payment is confirmed, and ordinary purchases need no identity verification.

Before you pay, check these with any provider (ProxyField's answers):

Which type is the wrong buy:

• Datacenter for protected sites: hosting ranges are the first to be blocked, so the low price per GB is wasted on failed requests.
• Mobile for ordinary websites: it costs the most per GB ($3.45 at 1 GB), and residential IPs do the same job there for less.
• Rotating residential when you need one fixed IP: the IP changes, so an allowlist or a long login breaks; buy an ISP IP instead.
• ISP for large-scale collection: one IP per purchase cannot spread thousands of requests the way a rotating pool does.

Yes. At ProxyField one prepaid balance pays for both residential and mobile traffic: no separate plans, no subscription, and the traffic never expires. Mobile costs $0.50 more per GB in every band, so 1 GB of each at the entry rate is $2.95 + $3.45 = $6.40, and both run through one gateway and one dashboard.

Each purchase gets the tier rate of its own volume. Volume tiers count per product: residential and mobile GB are counted separately.

Paying into the balance: crypto only (USDT, BTC, ETH and 10 other coins); the smallest payment is $2.95; the checkout holds the exchange rate for 35 minutes; BTC confirms in about 19 minutes (2 confirmations), USDT on TRC-20 in about 1 minute and on ERC-20 in about 4 minutes. Access opens once the payment is confirmed.

Across the market it depends on the provider. Providers use one of three models, so check the wording before you pay:

Residential and mobile, per GB, by volume in one purchase (mobile is residential + $0.50 in every band):

Datacenter and ISP:

The tier rate applies to the whole purchase of rotating datacenter traffic; dedicated IPs have one price per IP. Not sold: IPv6 proxies, shared datacenter or ISP lists, mobile proxies per port or per device, and rotating ISP proxies by the GB. Full price tables are on pricing.

• What is an HTTP proxy?: the most common protocol.
• SOCKS5 vs HTTP and SOCKS4 vs SOCKS5.
• Residential vs datacenter proxies, mobile vs residential proxies, ISP vs residential proxies.
• Static vs rotating proxies and sticky vs rotating sessions.
• Shared, private and dedicated proxies.
• What is a proxy pool?, proxy chaining, what is an SSL proxy?.