Choosing and Changing Your Proxy Locations

Where each Node4 product sets its country, how to get US-only or Italy and Spain addresses, and how to ask support to move proxies you already have.

Where you choose a location depends on the product. On the static datacenter plans the country belongs to each address, so you choose it at checkout (Premium Datacenter) or ask support for it (Shared Datacenter). The gateway products choose an exit for every connection, so you choose the country in the username and can change it whenever you like.

Product	Where the location is set	Locations	To change it
Premium Datacenter	The Country picker at checkout	United States, Italy, Spain, or Any country	Open a ticket
Shared Datacenter	Ask support after you buy	United States, Italy, Spain	Open a ticket
Rotating Datacenter and Rotating Unmetered	`-country-` in the username	United States, Italy, Spain	Edit the username
Residential	`-country-`, `-state-` and `-city-` in the username	The residential coverage list	Edit the username

You need a Node4 account for every option here. For the gateway products you also need your proxy username and password, which are on the Proxies page and under Auth & IP Access.

Premium Datacenter: pick the country at checkout

When your cart holds a Premium Datacenter plan, the checkout shows a Country choice under the plan:

Leave United States selected for US addresses only. It is the default.
Choose Italy or Spain for addresses in that country only.
Choose Any country if any of the three will do.

A grayed-out country is not available for that plan size right now. If a country becomes unavailable between choosing it and paying, checkout says so and asks you to choose another, before anything is charged.

The country stays with the plan:

Renewal keeps the same addresses.
Refresh IP on the Proxies page (or the API) gives you a replacement address, and the row shows its country. If a replacement is not in the country you need, open a ticket.
A paused plan that you resume after the payment hold comes back in the country it had before.

If you bought with Any country and want everything in one country, open a ticket and say which country. Support moves the addresses; your credential and port stay the same, so all you change in your tool is the address list.

Shared Datacenter: ask for a country

Shared Datacenter has no country picker at checkout. Each row on the Proxies page shows its country. When a plan holds addresses in more than one country, the country chips above the list filter it.

To have every shared address in one country, or a split such as half Italy and half Spain, buy the normal plan and open a ticket with the split you want. Italy and Spain are sold at the same price as the United States. Once support has moved them, download the list again: the addresses you no longer hold are refused, so a tool still using the old list sees errors on those rows.

Rotating: add the country to the username

Rotating Datacenter and Rotating Unmetered pick a fresh exit for each connection. Append -country- and a two-letter code to your username to keep those exits in one country:

# United States exits, Rotating Datacenter over HTTP
curl -x "http://USERNAME-country-us:PASSWORD@gw-rotating_datacenter.node4.io:8083" https://node4.io/api/tools/ip

# Italian exits over SOCKS5
curl -x "socks5h://USERNAME-country-it:PASSWORD@gw-rotating_datacenter.node4.io:1083" https://node4.io/api/tools/ip

The response names the exit address and the country it geolocates to. Rotating Unmetered takes the same username on gw-rotating_unmetered.node4.io, at the ports shown for it on the Proxies page; a targeted connection counts toward its connection limit like any other.

What the rotating gateways accept:

Countries: us, it and es. A country with no exits is refused with a 502 and a plain-text reason. It is never served from another country, so retrying will not help; change the code or drop the segment.
Country only. State, city and network targeting are residential features.
Sessions combine with it. USERNAME-country-es-session-job42 holds one Spanish exit for up to 30 minutes; sticky vs rotating sessions explains the session rules.
A misspelled key fails loudly. -contry-it makes the whole username unrecognized, so the gateway answers 407 instead of rotating worldwide. Fixing 407 errors walks through the checks.

Over SOCKS5 a refused country arrives as a "host unreachable" reply, because SOCKS5 has no room for a message. On the rotating gateways, a whitelisted server keeps its country by sending the targeted username with an empty password; IP whitelisting best practices covers each product.

If you build strings in code, the API returns them ready-made for a country: see building proxy strings with the gateway API.

Residential: country, state and city

The residential gateway accepts a country, a state, a city and a network, all in the username:

curl -x "http://USERNAME-country-us-state-tx-city-austin:PASSWORD@gw-residential.node4.io:8082" https://node4.io/api/tools/ip

Some city names exist in more than one state. Those are refused until you add the state: -country-us-city-dallas fails, while -country-us-state-tx-city-dallas works. The same applies abroad, as in -country-co-state-dc-city-bogota for Bogota, Colombia. The full grammar, the coverage list and the targeting builder on the Proxies page are in residential targeting.

Check where an exit is

Two checks tell you whether you got the country you asked for.

The X-Node4-Country header. The rotating gateways report what happened to your country segment: honored (the exit is in that country), unavailable (refused, no exits there) or none (no country segment was read). You can read it on plain-HTTP responses and on every refusal:

curl -s -o /dev/null -D - -x "http://USERNAME-country-it:PASSWORD@gw-rotating_datacenter.node4.io:8083" http://example.com | grep -i x-node4

A successful HTTPS tunnel does not carry it, because the gateway answers the CONNECT before the destination does, and SOCKS5 carries no headers at all. For those, use the second check.

An IP-check service. Request https://node4.io/api/tools/ip through the proxy, as in the examples above, or open What Is My IP in a browser configured with the proxy. Geolocation databases sometimes disagree about an address, especially a recently moved one, so if a target places you in the wrong country, compare two services; why proxy locations differ between lookups explains the causes.

Ask support to change locations

Open a ticket from Support in the dashboard. Support, sales and billing run 24/7, and you get a reply within 12 hours. Include:

the plan (Premium Datacenter or Shared Datacenter) and its order or subscription;
the country you want, or the split between countries;
which addresses to move, or "all of them".

Your credential, the ports and the hostnames do not change when addresses move. Re-copy the address list from the Proxies page and replace the old one in your tool. If the location you want is outside the United States, Italy and Spain, the datacenter products cannot provide it; Residential proxies cover far more countries, and choosing the right proxy type compares the options.

Product details and current plans: datacenter proxies, shared proxies, rotating proxies and pricing.