Residential vs Datacenter Proxies: What a Checker Sees

In short: A datacenter proxy’s address belongs to a hosting company, and a residential or ISP proxy’s address belongs to an internet provider. Any site can read which from public registration and routing records on every request, and a site screening its traffic acts on that record.

A site screening its traffic can read two public records on every request, and those records decide whether an address counts as datacenter or residential. A third arrangement sits apart from both categories.

Which public records does a site read?

A site reads two records: who holds the address block, and which network announces it.

Registration comes first. IANA distributes blocks of addresses and autonomous system numbers to the five regional internet registries, which assign them onward and keep a public record of who holds each block; RFC 7020 describes the system. Those records can be queried over RDAP, the registries’ structured alternative to WHOIS, whose responses are defined in RFC 9083 and explained for users in ARIN’s RDAP guide.

Routing is the second record: which network, identified by its autonomous system number, announces the block to the rest of the internet through BGP (RFC 4271). RFC 7020 is explicit that how addresses are announced is outside the registry system’s scope. The two records are separate, and a site can read either.

A site behind a large CDN may not have to run the lookup at all. Cloudflare, for one, attaches the ASN and the name of the organisation that holds it to every request it passes to code on its Workers platform (Cloudflare’s documentation). Our What Is My IP page shows the same two fields for your own connection.

When a request arrives, a site can ask whose network it came from, and the reply is an operator’s name. Next, the site can ask what that operator sells. Hosting companies sell servers, broadband carriers sell connections to households, and mobile operators sell phone plans. That table lookup is where the datacenter-versus-residential distinction comes from.

What does a lookup return for datacenter and residential addresses?

A lookup on a datacenter address returns a hosting company. Whoever rents the address cannot change that record. For a target that treats automated traffic differently from human traffic, the record is enough to decide.

A lookup on a residential address returns a consumer internet provider. The machine behind it is somebody’s home connection, so the request arrives from a domestic uplink, with its speed, its variance and its habit of going away when someone reboots a router.

Both answers are accurate; which one a target accepts is its own policy, set by what it is protecting.

Is there a third option besides datacenter and residential?

Yes: the ISP proxy, also sold as static residential, runs on hardware in a data centre with an address on an internet provider’s network. A lookup returns that provider’s name, and the machine answers at server speed and stays up, which is the combination ProxyJam sells.

Datacenter and residential each bundle two separate properties: where the machine is and whose name is on the address. The ISP proxy takes one from each, so it sits off the price-and-speed line.

Buying it means paying for the address and committing to a period. Traffic is unmetered, and past 50 GB in a calendar month a proxy’s ceiling falls from 100 concurrent sessions to 10 until its next billing period (Terms of Service, section 2.4). Details are on the ISP proxies page and prices on the pricing page. If you want the definition first, read what an ISP proxy is.

What does the usual comparison get wrong?

• Speed. A residential address is slow because the home connection behind it is. Move the machine to a data centre, keep an internet provider’s registration, and the speed comes back.
• Price. The price gap is a supply story. Hosting companies hold large address blocks already routed to their own racks, while addresses registered to internet providers have to come through them, one household or one carrier agreement at a time.
• Detection as a contest. Some refusals come from a published record and a rule the target applied to it. A promise of being undetectable leaves that record unchanged.
• Shared history. A shared datacenter address carries whatever its previous occupants did, which can explain a refusal. Paying for a dedicated address stops anyone else adding to that history while you hold it and is worth doing, and the registration stays a hosting company’s either way.

Verify whatever you buy against the registration record. If the record says hosting company and the invoice says residential, the record is right. For an address on an internet provider’s network that holds still, the ISP proxies page has the catalogue for 77 countries. When nobody on the other end is checking, a datacenter address remains the sensible buy, from whoever sells one. The carrier case is covered in mobile against residential, which explains what a phone network adds.