Datacenter vs residential proxies: which one does your site need?
Datacenter proxies use IPs owned by hosting companies: cheaper per connection, quick, and fine for most public sites. Residential proxies use IPs that ISPs assign to homes: sites that block hosting ranges usually let them through. Start with datacenter, test your real targets, and move only the sites that keep blocking you to residential.
The question usually shows up mid-problem. A scraper that ran fine for weeks starts getting CAPTCHAs on Amazon, Home Depot or Google. Someone on a forum says “use residential”, and residential costs more. Is it the IP type, or something else?
Here’s the difference in one line. A datacenter IP belongs to a hosting or cloud company. A residential IP belongs to a consumer internet provider and normally sits on someone’s home connection. Websites can look up which kind of organisation owns an address, and some treat hosting ranges far more strictly than home ones. That single fact explains most of the price and success gap between the two.
But the IP type isn’t the only thing sites check. Request speed, headers, cookies and browser fingerprints matter too, and a residential IP sent 50 requests a second gets blocked as well. This guide shows how sites tell the types apart, a short test that tells you which one your targets need, worked sizing for each, and the mistakes that make people pay for residential when they didn’t need it.
Which Storm plan fits
If a site keeps returning CAPTCHAs or 403s on datacenter IPs, residential ports are the fix to try: 5 ports at $50 give five home IPs at once, each changing every 5 minutes, unlimited bandwidth. For everything that already works on datacenter, stay on rotating proxies (40 threads for $39): a new IP per connection, and cheaper per parallel request. Many buyers end up with both, split by target.
Residential rotating proxies (from $19/mo): 20M+ residential IPs. Each port is one IP at a time that changes every 5 minutes, up to 50 threads per port. USA or EU. Unlimited bandwidth on every plan.
Get 5 ports for $50/mo See all residential rotating proxies plansBefore you start
- Log in to the member area and copy your gateway
IP:PORTs. They never change; the rotation happens on our side. - Add the public IP of the computer or server that will run your tool under Authorized IPs, click Save, and allow up to 15 minutes before testing. Rotating and residential proxies use IP authentication, so there is no username or password.
- Count your threads: the tool’s total open connections must stay within your plan (for example 40 threads on the 40-thread plan).
Decide in 30 minutes: test your own targets
- List your targets, not your project
Write down every site you’ll hit. A price tracker might cover five stores, a search engine and a few blogs. They rarely all need the same IP type, so you decide per site.
- Run each site on datacenter first
Point a small batch (50 to 100 requests per site) through the Main gateway of a rotating plan, at the concurrency you plan to use. The 10-thread package is enough for this test.
- Count real failures, not just errors
Log status codes and look inside 200 responses too: a CAPTCHA page, an “access denied” template or an empty product grid often arrives with status 200. Count those as failures.
- Slow down before you switch
If a site fails, halve concurrency, add a short random pause and send realistic headers, then rerun. Many datacenter failures are rate limits, which slower pacing fixes for free.
- Move only the stubborn sites to residential
Sites that still fail at low speed are probably screening hosting ranges. Run the same batch through a residential port. If the failure rate drops sharply, that site belongs on residential.
- Size each part separately
Put datacenter-friendly sites on a thread plan and residential-only sites on ports, using the sizing below. Recheck every month or two: sites change their rules.
Check IP type and compare both on one site
The first command shows who owns the exit IP; on a datacenter gateway the org field names a hosting company, on a residential port an ISP. The script then sends the same requests through both and counts blocks.
curl -s -x http://GATEWAY_IP:PORT https://ipinfo.io/json
# "org": "AS... Some Hosting Ltd" -> datacenter range
# "org": "AS... Some Cable Company" -> residential (ISP) rangeimport random, time, requests
from collections import Counter
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
GATEWAYS = {
"datacenter": "http://GATEWAY_IP:PORT", # rotating, Main gateway
"residential": "http://GATEWAY_IP:PORT", # one residential port
}
URLS = [u.strip() for u in open("urls.txt") if u.strip()][:100]
BLOCK_MARKERS = ("captcha", "access denied", "unusual traffic", "robot")
HEADERS = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) "
"AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0 Safari/537.36",
"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9", "Connection": "close"}
def fetch(url, proxy):
time.sleep(random.uniform(1, 3))
try:
r = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS, timeout=(10, 30),
proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy})
except requests.RequestException as e:
return type(e).__name__
body = r.text[:20000].lower()
if r.status_code == 200 and any(m in body for m in BLOCK_MARKERS):
return "200-but-blocked"
return str(r.status_code)
for name, proxy in GATEWAYS.items():
with ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=5) as pool:
results = Counter(pool.map(lambda u: fetch(u, proxy), URLS))
print(name, dict(results))Side by side
- Who owns the IP: datacenter, a hosting or cloud company; residential, a consumer ISP.
- How sites react: many sites accept both; stricter retailers, ticketing and search engines often challenge hosting ranges sooner.
- Speed: datacenter routes run server to server; residential traffic passes through home connections, so responses vary more.
- Pool size at Storm: 700,000+ datacenter IPs; 20M+ residential IPs.
- Rotation at Storm: datacenter, a new IP per connection (Main) or every 3 or 15 minutes; residential, one IP per port that changes every 5 minutes at fixed times.
- How you pay at Storm: datacenter per thread, residential per port. Unlimited bandwidth on both, so heavy pages don’t raise the bill.
- Locations at Storm: datacenter USA, EU, USA+EU or Worldwide; residential USA or EU. No city or state choice on either.
How sites tell the two apart
Every public IP is registered to an organisation in the regional internet registries (ARIN for North America, RIPE NCC for Europe), and commercial IP databases sort those owners into hosting, ISP, mobile and so on. A site can check your IP against such a database in milliseconds. If the owner is a cloud or hosting company, some sites block outright, some show a CAPTCHA, most do nothing.
The IP owner is one signal among several. Sites also watch how many requests one address sends, whether headers look like a real browser, whether cookies persist, and whether a browser’s fingerprint matches its claimed system. That’s why a residential IP doesn’t guarantee success, and why a well-paced datacenter scraper often works fine on sites with a reputation for being strict.
Worked sizing: threads vs ports
The two products are counted differently, which trips up most buyers. A thread is one open connection; on the Main gateway each new connection gets a new IP. A residential port is one IP at a time, shared by up to 50 threads, replaced every 5 minutes. So the useful question for residential is: how many requests will each IP carry?
Example: 30,000 product pages a day from one strict retailer, spread over 10 hours. That’s 3,000 requests an hour.
- On rotating datacenter with 40 threads, those 3,000 requests leave from about 3,000 different connections and IPs. Per-IP load is near zero; the question is only whether the site accepts hosting ranges.
- On 5 residential ports, each port gets 12 IPs an hour, so 60 IPs share 3,000 requests: 50 per IP in 5 minutes, or 10 a minute. Some strict sites tolerate that, some don’t.
- On 20 residential ports ($160), 240 IPs an hour carry about 12 requests each per 5-minute window. That’s much gentler per IP.
Rule of thumb: on residential, scale ports, not threads, when blocks rise. On datacenter, scale threads only as far as the target tolerates. Start with the 5-port residential package for the stubborn site and the 40-thread rotating plan for the rest, then adjust with one-click upgrades in the member area.
When each one is the right call
Datacenter fits: public pages, news and blog crawling, SEO crawls with Screaming Frog, most API-style endpoints, ScrapeBox harvesting, search engines at modest concurrency (a quarter of your threads), and any job where volume matters more than per-IP trust.
Residential fits: retailers and marketplaces that block hosting ranges, sites that show different content to datacenter visitors, ad checks where you need to look like a home user, and smaller jobs where a CAPTCHA per page costs more than the port.
Neither fits: long-lived logged-in accounts. Both Storm pools rotate. Accounts need a fixed IP that stays the same for weeks, which is what private dedicated proxies are for. More on that split in rotating vs static proxies.
Mistakes that send people to residential too early
- Too many threads on one site. 150 connections against one store looks like an attack on any IP type. Reduce per-site concurrency first.
- Default library headers. A
python-requestsuser agent is blocked on sight by many retailers, whatever the IP. - Connection reuse. Keep-alive pins one exit IP, so a “rotating” scraper hammers a single address. Send
Connection: closeor open new connections. - A browser that eats threads. One headless tab opens around 10 connections. A 10-thread plan running a browser is effectively one tab.
- Expecting residential to be faster. It’s usually the opposite. If speed is the complaint, residential won’t fix it.
Common errors and fixes
FAQ
Are residential proxies better than datacenter proxies?
Not across the board. Residential IPs get through stricter sites more often; datacenter IPs are cheaper per connection and usually quicker. Use residential where datacenter fails, not everywhere.
Can websites detect datacenter proxies?
They can see that the IP belongs to a hosting company. Whether they act on it varies by site. Most public sites don’t; strict retailers and search engines often add friction.
Why are residential proxies more expensive?
The IPs come from home connections, which are scarcer than server addresses. Most providers bill residential per GB; Storm bills per port with unlimited bandwidth instead.
Which is better for Google scraping?
On Storm, rotating datacenter on the Main gateway with no more than a quarter of your threads on Google. Residential ports share one IP among their threads for 5 minutes, which suits light search volume.
Can I use both on Storm?
Yes, as separate plans. Many buyers run a rotating plan for most sites and a few residential ports for the strict ones, each with its own gateways.
Can I try residential before committing?
The 1-port residential package ($19) has a 24-hour money-back guarantee on your first order, and so does the 10-thread rotating package ($14). Bigger packages aren’t refundable.
Still have questions? Contact us here. A real person answers.
Related guides
Tool facts checked against the official documentation (October 2026): ARIN: Whois and RDAP · RIPE NCC: RIPE Database · Requests docs: Proxies · RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics, status codes. Storm Proxies facts: our plans page and refund policy.
Unlimited bandwidth. One flat monthly price.
Access is live the moment you pay, and the smallest package of each proxy type has a 24-hour money-back guarantee on your first order.