Dedicated vs Shared Datacenter Proxies: Which to Buy
Shared proxies put several customers on each IP; dedicated gives you the address alone. How tenancy, data and price differ, and which jobs need which.
Buy shared datacenter proxies when price per IP matters most and an occasional retry is acceptable: development, QA, geo checks and moderate crawls of tolerant targets. Buy dedicated datacenter proxies when the address's reputation has to be yours alone, when a service whitelists your IP, or when you move enough data that a per-IP allowance starts to bind. Both are the same kind of address; the difference is who else uses it and how the data is billed.
On Node4, both run on datacenter blocks Node4 owns in the US, Italy and Spain and answer HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 on one credential. Node4 publishes this guide and sells both products.
The difference in one table
| Node4 Shared Datacenter | Node4 Dedicated (Premium Datacenter) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who uses each IP | Up to five customers, enforced at allocation | One customer |
| Data | 3 GB per proxy, pooled across your order, with top-ups any time | No data cap |
| Price at the entry size | $5.00/month for 25 proxies ($0.20 per proxy) | $7.45/month for 5 proxies ($1.49 per proxy) |
| Price at 1,000 IPs | $140.00/month for 1,000 proxies ($0.14 per proxy) | $750.00/month for 1,000 proxies ($0.75 per proxy) |
| IP reputation | Shared with the other tenants on that address | Yours |
| Free test | The free tier is shared: 3 free shared proxies with 1 GB/month bandwidth and 10 concurrent threads | No free tier; test the target on shared first |
Tenants on a shared IP share its reputation, never each other's traffic or credentials. Each customer authenticates separately and sees only their own usage.
What the words mean at other providers
"Shared", "private", "semi-dedicated" and "dedicated" are not used the same way across the market, so check the tenancy each vendor states rather than the label. Vendor figures below are from each provider's own pages, checked October 5, 2026.
| Provider | Shared tier | Dedicated tier |
|---|---|---|
| Oxylabs | $1.20 an IP for 10 shared IPs, falling to $0.70 at 3,000, with up to 3 users on each shared IP | $2.25 an IP for 3 dedicated IPs, falling to $1.20 at 1,000 |
| Bright Data | $1.40 an IP for 10 shared IPs, falling to $0.90 at 1,000 | $2.20 an IP for 10 dedicated IPs, falling to $1.30 at 1,000 |
| Webshare | $2.99 a month for 100 proxies; its "private" proxies are semi-dedicated, shared with one other user | $26.60 a month for 20 dedicated proxies, $1.33 each, shown as 5% off a $28.00 list total, with 250 GB of bandwidth by default and larger bandwidth priced in the order form |
| Froxy | shared datacenter proxies only, with multiple users on the same IP pool | None offered, per the same page |
Two patterns stand out. First, the number of tenants on a shared IP varies by vendor, and a lower number means less shared history on each address. Second, a "private" proxy is not always a dedicated one: Webshare's private tier has a second user on each address. If the job needs an address nobody else touches, look for a stated tenancy of one.
When shared is the right buy
- Development and staging. You need working exits to build and test a scraper, not a pristine reputation.
- Geo checks and QA. Confirming what a page shows from another country does not depend on who else used the IP yesterday.
- Moderate crawls of tolerant targets. Public pages that do not track IP history closely, where a retry on a refused request is cheap.
- Many IPs at low cost. Shared is Node4's lowest price per IP, and the data allowance pools across your order: every proxy adds its share to one balance, and any single proxy can use the whole pool.
Same-type plans stack, so a second shared order adds its proxies and its allowance to the first. When the pool runs low you can top up bandwidth without changing plan; nothing is billed for overage you did not ask for, and access pauses at the cap unless you have turned auto top-up on.
When dedicated is worth the difference
- Account work and logins. A site that remembers which IP an account uses should see the same address every time, with no other customer's history attached to it.
- Whitelisted APIs. A partner that whitelists your egress IP needs one that belongs to you.
- Sustained heavy volume. Dedicated proxies have no data cap, so a job that moves far more than the pooled shared allowance costs the same at a terabyte as at a gigabyte.
- Targets that punish shared history. If one tenant's behavior gets an address flagged, everyone on it inherits the flag. On a dedicated IP, the only history is yours.
Dedicated IPs are static until you refresh them from the dashboard. Traffic leaves from the exact address you connect to, with no gateway in between.
A worked example
Suppose a team runs 100 datacenter IPs for price monitoring and moves about 1 TB a month.
- Shared: $17.00/month for 100 proxies ($0.17 per proxy). The pooled allowance at 100 proxies is far below 1 TB, so the rest of the month runs on top-ups; their price is on the shared pricing page.
- Dedicated: $109.00/month for 100 proxies ($1.09 per proxy), with no data cap, so the 1 TB adds nothing.
At a few gigabytes per IP a month, shared costs far less for the same IP count. At hundreds of gigabytes per IP, compare shared plus top-ups against dedicated before choosing. Put your own volume into the proxy calculator.
When neither fits
Both are datacenter addresses. Targets that refuse hosting ranges outright refuse shared and dedicated alike, and more datacenter IPs do not change that; can datacenter proxies get blocked explains how sites classify them, and datacenter vs residential proxies covers the switch to residential. If you need a different exit per connection rather than a fixed list of IPs, rotating proxies are the product to look at.
Deciding, in order
- Test the target from a datacenter address first. The free tier is shared datacenter, so it answers whether the target accepts datacenter ranges at all, without a card.
- If it does, ask whether the IP's reputation or identity has to be yours. If yes, buy dedicated proxies.
- If not, estimate monthly data per IP. Low volume points to shared proxies; sustained heavy volume points to dedicated.
For dedicated datacenter terms compared across five providers, see datacenter proxy providers compared. For the product decision across every Node4 product, start with choosing the right proxy type.