Residential vs Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping: Cost, Speed and When to Use Each

Residential vs datacenter proxies comes down to where the IP address lives. A residential proxy sends your requests through an IP that an internet provider assigned to a home connection, so to a website you look like an ordinary visitor. A datacenter proxy uses an IP from a server in a data center: faster and cheaper, but easy for a site to recognize as not-a-home.

For web scraping the rule of thumb is simple: start with datacenter IPs on sites that don't fight bots, and use residential IPs where datacenter traffic gets blocked or where you need to look like a local visitor. Below is how they compare, when to use which, what each costs per GB on Scrape.ly, and how much traffic two real scraping runs actually used.

Residential vs datacenter proxies at a glance

What are datacenter proxies?

Datacenter proxies are IP addresses hosted on servers in data centers rather than on home networks. Those IP ranges are registered to hosting providers, and anyone can look up who owns an IP. That's their strength and their weakness. They sit on fast, stable connections, a provider can offer large numbers of them, and bandwidth is cheap, which is why datacenter traffic costs a quarter of residential on Scrape.ly's Free plan. But a website can tell at a glance that a request comes from a server, and since real shoppers and readers browse from homes and phones, sites that care about bots can challenge or block datacenter ranges wholesale.

Plenty of sites don't care. Public data portals, documentation, many listing pages and most smaller sites serve datacenter traffic happily. For those, residential IPs only add cost.

What are residential proxies?

Residential proxies route your traffic through IP addresses that consumer internet providers assign to homes. To the website, each request looks like it comes from someone browsing on their home connection. That's the point: anti-bot systems weigh where traffic comes from, and home IPs are where real visitors are.

Residential pools also let you pick a country, which matters when a site shows different prices, results or content by location. The trade-off is speed and price: a home connection is slower and less predictable than a server, and residential bandwidth costs more per GB.

When to use which

Use datacenter proxies when:

• The site has no serious bot protection and you're getting clean pages.
• You're crawling a lot of pages and speed and cost matter more than blending in.
• You're scraping documentation, public records or open data.

Use residential proxies when:

• Datacenter requests get blocked, challenged or served different content.
• You need results as a local visitor in a specific country would see them.
• The site is a big e-commerce, travel, search or social platform with active bot defenses.

A good habit is to try datacenter first, watch the failure rate, and move to residential only for the sites that need it. Proxies are one layer of several, though. Headers, pacing and browser fingerprints matter as much; our pillar guide to web scraping without getting blocked covers all of them, and how to bypass Cloudflare when scraping covers the hardest common case.

ISP and mobile proxies, briefly

Two more types come up when you compare proxy providers:

• ISP proxies, also called static residential, are IP addresses registered to an internet provider but hosted on servers. They aim for residential reputation with datacenter speed, and they usually stay the same for a long time, which suits long logged-in sessions more than scraping.
• Mobile proxies route traffic through mobile carrier networks. Carriers often share one IP among many phones, so sites are cautious about blocking them. They're rarely needed for scraping public pages.

For scraping public data, residential and datacenter cover the jobs that matter, and they're the two pools Scrape.ly runs.

What residential and datacenter proxies cost on Scrape.ly

Scrape.ly bills proxy traffic per GB as part of a run's usage, at your plan's rate:

Each paid plan's monthly price comes back as usage credit. There's no traffic commitment and no separate proxy subscription: you pay for the bytes a run moves, and that cost counts toward the run's maximum charge, so a run stops before it spends more than you allow. Traffic through your own proxies is never billed as proxy usage. The proxies page has the full feature list and pricing the plans.

How much traffic does scraping actually use?

Per-GB pricing only means something if you know how many GB a job takes. Two real runs from the Scrape.ly Store, both billed at the Business rates:

• Residential: the Website Content Crawler crawled 10 pages of the Python docs on 22 October 2026 over HTTP. It moved 0.14 MB of residential traffic, about 14 KB per page, for $0.0003 of proxy cost.
• Datacenter: the eBay Scraper saved 10 listings on 22 October 2026 through the datacenter pool. It moved 2.5 MB, about 253 KB per listing, for $0.0019 of proxy cost.

Scaled up at the same traffic per page, here is what 10,000 pages or listings would cost in proxy traffic alone (the Actors' per-result fees and compute come on top):

Two lessons. Proxy cost is driven by bytes, so a lean HTTP crawler on residential can cost less than a heavier scraper on datacenter. And when datacenter works, it cuts the proxy bill for the same job by 63% to 75%, depending on the plan.

How Scrape.ly Actors pick a proxy

Store Actors that use the managed proxy expose a Proxy configuration field in their input, and the publisher picks the default pool for the site. The eBay Scraper defaults to datacenter, with the note "Datacenter is enough for public active listings":

{ "useScrapelyProxy": true, "scrapelyProxyGroups": ["DATACENTER"] }

The Website Content Crawler's default is {"useScrapelyProxy": true}, which means the residential pool. You can change either in the form or in the API input. The rules, from the proxy docs:

• There are two groups, RESIDENTIAL (the default when no group is set) and DATACENTER. Legacy names such as SHADER map to datacenter.
• Add "scrapelyProxyCountry": "US" (any two-letter ISO code) to choose the exit country.
• Any other group is refused with a clear error and never billed, rather than quietly routed through another pool.
• Apify names work too: useApifyProxy, apifyProxyGroups and apifyProxyCountry, so inputs written for Apify run unchanged.
• If the Actor runs its browser on the Scrape.ly browser, browser traffic uses that browser's own residential proxy and is billed as browser credits, not proxy GB.

Use the proxy from your own scraper

When you write your own Actor, the SDK reads the proxy credentials the platform injects into each run, so there's no username or password to manage. This is the JavaScript example from the docs, a Cheerio crawler on US datacenter IPs:

import { Actor, CheerioCrawler } from 'scrapely';

await Actor.main(async () => {
    const proxyConfiguration = await Actor.createProxyConfiguration({
        groups: ['DATACENTER'],
        countryCode: 'US',
    });

    const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
        proxyConfiguration,
        requestHandler: async ({ request, $ }) => {
            await Actor.pushData({ url: request.url, title: $('title').text() });
        },
    });

    await crawler.run(['https://example.com']);
});

Switch to groups: ['RESIDENTIAL'] (or leave groups out) for the residential pool. In Python it's await Actor.create_proxy_configuration(groups=["RESIDENTIAL"], country_code="US"), then await proxy_configuration.new_url() for a proxy URL to hand to your HTTP client. To keep related requests on one IP, pass a session ID to newUrl(sessionId).

Two details worth knowing. The password is the run ID and only works from inside that run, so an Actor never holds a reusable proxy credential that could leak. And you can mix in your own proxy URLs, or use them instead, with proxyUrls. See the anti-blocking page for how the proxy and the Scrape.ly browser fit together.

FAQ

Are residential proxies better than datacenter proxies for web scraping?

On sites with active bot protection, yes: residential IPs look like ordinary visitors and are rarely blocked as a range. On sites without it, datacenter proxies do the same job faster and for a quarter of the price on Scrape.ly's Free plan. Use datacenter by default and residential where you need it.

Why are residential proxies more expensive?

Because the bandwidth comes from home connections rather than data center links, which are built for bulk traffic. On Scrape.ly residential traffic costs $2 to $4 per GB by plan, datacenter $0.75 to $1.

Can websites detect datacenter proxies?

Yes. Who owns an IP range is public information, so a site can tell that a request comes from a hosting provider. Whether it acts on that depends on the site; many don't.

Do I need residential proxies for web scraping?

Not always. Many public sites serve datacenter traffic without trouble. You need residential proxies for web scraping when datacenter requests get blocked or challenged, or when you need to see a site as a local visitor in a specific country.

Are residential proxies legal?

Using a proxy is generally lawful; what matters is what you do through it, and this is not legal advice. Scrape public data, respect robots.txt, the site's terms and its rate limits, and avoid personal data you don't need. Store Actors on Scrape.ly collect publicly available data that any visitor can see.