Mobile vs residential vs datacentre proxies

Three categories, sold at wildly different prices, and the expensive one is frequently the wrong choice. Here is the honest comparison, including when you should not buy what this site sells.

The comparison

	Datacentre	Residential	Mobile
Where the IP lives	Server hosting provider	Home broadband line	Mobile carrier network
Speed	Fastest	Moderate	Slowest, most variable
Cost per GB	Cheapest	Expensive	Most expensive
How sites score it	Obviously a server	Looks like a household	Looks like a phone
Cost of blocking it	Near zero for the site	Blocks one household	Blocks many subscribers at once
Typical sourcing	Bought from a host	Often from consent-murky SDK networks	Real SIMs on real plans

When a datacentre proxy is the right answer

Most of the time, honestly. If the site you are fetching does not score IP reputation — plenty of public APIs, documentation sites, feeds and smaller sites do not — a datacentre proxy is faster and a fraction of the price. Paying mobile rates to fetch something that would have answered a plain server request is money set on fire.

Test with the cheap option first. Move up only when it actually fails.

Where residential proxies get uncomfortable

Residential IPs come from real households, and the supply has to come from somewhere. Large residential networks are commonly built by paying app developers to bundle an SDK that quietly turns users' devices into exit nodes. The consent is usually buried in a EULA nobody reads.

That has two consequences worth caring about. Ethically, someone's home connection is carrying your traffic without meaningfully agreeing to it. Practically, those pools are enormous, shared, and heavily abused — so the address you are handed may already be burned by whoever used it an hour ago.

Not every provider works this way. It is a fair question to ask one directly, and the answer tells you a lot.

Where mobile is genuinely worth the money

Mobile is the right tool in a narrow set of cases:

The destination clearly blocks or challenges datacentre ranges
You need the answer a real phone would get — mobile-specific pricing, apps, or layouts
You need a specific country and the mobile pool there is small, as with Canada
You need an IP whose reputation is not already ruined by strangers

Outside those, cheaper options do the job.

Questions worth asking any proxy vendor

Is it dedicated or shared? A shared pool means inheriting other people's blocks.
Do you own the infrastructure, or resell it? Resellers usually cannot tell you what is upstream, which means they cannot fix anything either.
What is the actual rotation success rate? Not "instant rotation" — a number. If they have never measured it, they do not know.
Where does the supply come from? Especially for residential.
What is the real bandwidth allowance? "Unlimited" mobile bandwidth does not exist.

These are the questions this site tries to answer without being asked. The specification page lists the network, the allocation model and the measured rotation figures, including the sample size.

Get in touch

Not sure whether mobile is the right tier for your job? Tell me what you are running and roughly how much bandwidth you need, and I will tell you straight — including if a cheaper option would do it.

Message @Canproxies on Telegram