Rotating Residential or Datacenter: How to Choose
Node4's rotating options compared: residential across 170+ countries, or datacenter rotation billed by the gigabyte or by connections. Which fits what.
Buy rotating residential when your target refuses datacenter addresses or shows different content by country outside the US, Italy and Spain. Otherwise buy rotating datacenter, which costs less per gigabyte ($0.59/GB on the smallest Rotating Datacenter plan, against $0.99/GB on the 10 GB residential plan), and choose its meter by volume: per gigabyte for a small or irregular job, per concurrent connection for a heavy one. This guide chooses between proxy types, using Node4's four products as the example. Node4 publishes it and sells all four. It compares published product terms; it is not a benchmark, and it does not rank vendors. For residential services compared against each other, see residential providers compared.
The four options at a glance
| Product | Exit type | Billing unit | Locations | Holding one exit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | Consumer connections, partner network | Per GB | 170+ countries | Session id; best effort, up to 30 min |
| Rotating Datacenter | Datacenter, Node4-owned blocks | Per GB | US, Italy, Spain | Session id; up to 30 minutes from first assignment |
| Rotating Unmetered | Same pool as Rotating Datacenter | Concurrent connections, no data cap | US, Italy, Spain | Same as Rotating Datacenter |
| Dedicated datacenter (not rotating) | Datacenter, Node4-owned blocks | Per proxy per month | One of US, Italy, Spain per address | The address never changes |
On both rotating gateways a new exit is chosen for each HTTPS tunnel, each SOCKS5 connection and each plain-HTTP request. HTTPS requests that a keep-alive client sends through one open tunnel keep that tunnel's exit; plain-HTTP requests do not, even on a reused connection. A session id in the username holds one exit across connections.
Does the target refuse datacenter addresses?
This question decides most cases, and it has an empirical answer. Send 200 requests to your real target through a rotating datacenter exit and 200 through a residential exit, and compare how many come back as the page you expected. If datacenter returns challenges, empty listings or 403s while residential returns content, the target classifies hosting ranges and only residential will work. If both return content, residential would cost more per gigabyte for a property you do not need.
The location check is the second part. Owned datacenter blocks are in the US, Italy and Spain. A job that needs Brazilian or Japanese exits is residential, whatever the target's defenses.
Residential: consumer exits in 170+ countries
Residential exits come from a partner network, not from ranges Node4 owns. Target country, state, city or ASN in the username (targeting syntax); a location with no exits is refused rather than swapped. A sticky session is best effort for up to 30 minutes and can end sooner if the device behind it goes offline, so code a multi-step flow to notice the exit changing and restart the step, rather than counting down. Plan sizes are on residential plan prices.
Where it loses: it costs more per gigabyte, each exit's speed depends on the home connection behind it, and the pool composition depends on the partner network.
Rotating datacenter: one pool, two meters
Rotating Datacenter and Rotating Unmetered draw the same owned exits in the same three countries with the same rotation and the same session window. Only the meter differs.
- Rotating Datacenter bills per gigabyte. When the allowance runs out, access pauses until you top up or the period renews, unless auto top-up is on.
- Rotating Unmetered bills by concurrent connections with no data cap. When every connection your size allows is open, new ones are refused and the open ones keep running.
To choose, take your expected monthly gigabytes and your scraper's real peak of open connections, and price both plans against both numbers on rotating datacenter pricing and connection-based pricing. A job with heavy pages and few connections favors the connection plan; light pages across many connections favor per-GB. There is no universal crossover point, because the two quantities do not convert into each other. Both are described on the rotating proxies page.
Dedicated datacenter: when you need the opposite of rotation
Some readers searching for rotating proxies need one address that never changes: a partner API that only accepts registered addresses, or a monitoring job that should look like the same visitor every day. A dedicated proxy is one owned address, yours alone, billed per proxy per month (dedicated pricing). It offers no protection against per-address rate limits, so it is the wrong tool for bulk collection.
The decision
Run the 200-request test first. If datacenter fails it, or you need countries outside the US, Italy and Spain, choose residential and design for best-effort sessions. If datacenter passes, choose rotating datacenter and pick the meter from your gigabytes and connections. If the job needs one fixed identity, choose a dedicated proxy instead of rotation. Rotating vs static proxies covers that last case, and rotating proxies for web scraping has client code for the first two. For the same decision applied to social platforms, see proxies for Instagram automation; for protocol choice, see SOCKS5 providers compared.