You often use proxies for various purposes, such as masking your IP address for activities such as web scraping and accessing geo-restricted content. You may often not know the different types of proxies that achieve these purposes and provide the highest anonymity level.
As you read along with this blog, you will discover two of the most common proxies you’re using every day; Datacenter and Residential proxies. Let’s dive deep into these two proxies.
Residential proxies are IP addresses provided to residential or homeowners from an Internet Service Provider (ISP). They are real IP addresses attached to a physical location, and thus they are seen as more legitimate.
Since Residential Proxy owners use actual IP addresses, the target websites you connect to are least likely to flag them. This is a significant advantage over Datacenter proxies that we shall cover in a forthcoming section. Residential Proxies are primarily used in web scraping projects to scrape a large volume of data and to access geo-restricted websites by keeping you anonymous.
On the other hand Datacenter proxies are unique IP addresses provided by actual data centers located across the globe. These Data centers are corporations that offer cloud services like Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, and others whose IP does not belong to any ISP.
The Datacenter proxies are available in Public, Private, and Shared forms. Just like the residential proxies, they can also be used for web scraping, accessing geo-restricted websites by keeping you anonymous.
But what about the differences? Well, that is what we are going to discuss from here on.
You now know the differences between residential and datacenter proxies.Let’s dive further to discover the differences in more detail.The main difference between Residential Proxies and Datacenter proxies lies in the origin of its IP. Every other difference that arises relies on the differences between household devices and servers.
A large number of proxy providers offer the option to rotate proxies. This option helps you to get new IP addresses depending on the request and availability of the device. You can set the rotating parameters by yourself, and the presence of rotating parameters eliminates the need to have a fresh IP every few minutes or hours.
A lot of companies make use of Ad Verification and scraping flight prices.
In this section, we will provide you with an overview of the benefits of the Datacenter proxies.
What most people will miss in these circumstances is that there are quite a lot of spammers who spam reputed websites frequently. In order to do so, they would use different IP addresses to get around the target website filters. The proxy that is most suited for this situation are the Datacenter proxies. This is primarily because they can easily be obtained in bulk compared to Residential proxies.
While most users are genuine Datacenter proxy users there are few of those with nefarious intentions who are using datacenter IPs. Legitimate users of Datacenter proxies usually emerge from corporate offices whose bosses encourage their employees to use them.So in order to make sure that only legitimate users use the datacenter proxies websites often employ high level security measures.
Such security systems will be able to identify that you are using a Datacenter IP. First, they would grab your Datacenter proxy’s IP info and check if you are using a Datacenter Gateway. If so, you will be placed inside a small subset of users under extra scrutiny.
From then onwards, specific security systems will go the extra mile to check through which port that you are connected through. Most of the Datacenter proxies will have several ports open.So it all comes down to security and legitimacy.
If you need faster proxies, the Datacenter IPs will do the trick who will also help you to mask your IP address. Speed, security, and legitimacy are the main differences between residential and datacenter proxies.
Although they are challenging to acquire, residential proxies will have no alarm bells ringing when you use them as they are legitimate. When you desire to Scarpe large volumes of data, the residential proxies are the overwhelming winner.
Residential proxies, on the other hand, offer diverse geographical locations. So you will have a wide variety of locations to choose from. As a result, you would need to decide a location in which to access the geo-restricted content and then a residential proxy based on that particular location.
Datacenter proxies can suit you if you understand how proxies function with some tech knowledge. Otherwise, it will be the Residential proxies that would be your ideal choice.
So all the differences mentioned here would make your choice a lot easier. Now since you are armed with the differences between residential and datacenter proxies, it’s time to move to larger comprehensive projects.
Yes, the location is undoubtedly essential. This is because certain websites impose geo-restrictions, which implies that you would connect to them when accessing specific areas. For example, you would need a proxy in the USA to access a US website from anywhere else globally, which is solely targeted to the US audience.
Yes, the Datacenter proxies have a high percentage of block rate because IP addresses assigned to them from a pool belong to the same network in the form of a subnet mask. So if one IP is blocked, most likely, the entire subnet mask could be blocked.
On the other hand, residential proxies have a low percentage of block rate as they tend to be more legitimate.
The residential proxies tend to be slower than the datacenter proxies due to several reasons. Firstly the IP addresses are rented from other devices. Secondly, the residential proxy providers do not have complete control over a residential proxy’s whole path, from ISP to how it connects to the internet. Thirdly, there is an additional device (Central Proxy Server) between you and the proxy server which directs your data to the residential IPs. These factors attribute to the slowness of residential proxies
The Residential Proxies and Datacenter proxies both hide your IP address, thus enabling you to be anonymous. Though both perform common tasks, there are significant differences between the two proxies. One such example being, it is harder for the target website to detect the residential proxies and impose a ban. This, however, doesn’t mean you should discard the datacenter proxies. As they too offer unique benefits.
We hope that you can now easily differentiate the two with the basic understanding that you obtained through this article.