Understanding Proxy Types

Datacenter, residential, shared, dedicated, static and rotating on three axes: where the address comes from, who else uses it, how it is delivered.

Every proxy does the same job: your request goes to the proxy, the proxy forwards it, and the target sees the proxy's address instead of yours. The types differ on three independent axes:

Node4's products sit at specific points on those axes: shared datacenter (static, shared), dedicated datacenter (static, one customer per IP), Rotating Datacenter and Rotating Unmetered (gateway, datacenter exits in the US, Italy and Spain), and residential (gateway, partner network, country and city targeting). This article explains the axes; choosing the right proxy type turns them into a decision.

How a website knows what kind of IP you are using

From public records. Every IPv4 address is allocated through a regional registry to a named organization, and routes to it are announced by an autonomous system (ASN) with a public number and name. A target can look up the source address before reading your request and learn which ASN announces it, whether that organization is a hosting company or a consumer ISP, which country the registration points to, and whether the address appears on a shared reputation list. The lookup is one query against a local database, which is why it is the first filter a site under automation pressure applies.

The most consequential bit in that lookup is hosting ASN versus eyeball network. A hosting ASN (datacenter operators, cloud platforms, server rental) originates almost no ordinary browsing; an eyeball network (a consumer ISP) originates almost nothing else. Every proxy type is a position relative to that classification.

Source: datacenter or residential

A datacenter proxy is an address assigned to a machine in a hosting facility and announced by a hosting ASN. The machine sits on server-grade bandwidth, so throughput is high and stable, and one machine can hold many addresses, so they are inexpensive at volume. The registration data says what it is: IP-intelligence databases label hosting ranges as hosting, and a target that subscribes to one knows at the TCP handshake that the request did not come from a home connection.

Whether that matters depends on the target. Most of the web does not check: public APIs, sites without bot pressure, price feeds, internal tooling and the long tail of ordinary websites treat a datacenter visitor like any other. Targets under heavy automation (large marketplaces, social platforms, ticketing, travel search) commonly treat a hosting-ASN source as elevated risk, with more challenges, tighter per-address limits, or a block on the range. The datacenter proxies page describes what Node4 operates in this category.

A residential proxy's exit is a device on an ordinary broadband subscription, with an address allocated by a consumer ISP and announced by that ISP's eyeball ASN. The registry lookup returns an answer shaped like a subscriber because the exit is one, so the target cannot separate your request from its ordinary audience on registration data alone. That is the value of the category and why it costs more.

The trade-offs follow from the physical reality. The addresses come from a partner network rather than blocks Node4 owns, so pool membership shifts as devices connect and disconnect and an individual exit has a limited, unpredictable lifetime. Each exit runs at consumer-line speed, so throughput varies. And residential access is metered by traffic rather than sold per address, which changes the economics of any workload that moves a lot of bytes. Delivery is through a gateway, and location targeting rides in the username; country and city targeting covers the grammar and the residential proxies page covers the product.

Tenancy: shared or dedicated

Reputation systems attach history to the address, not to the account using it, which is why tenancy is its own axis.

On a shared proxy, several customers exit through the same addresses. The cost of the address divides across those customers, which is why shared is the cheap end of the catalog, and the history divides the same way: a rate limit tripped by another tenant yesterday or an abuse report filed against traffic you never sent accrues to the address, and your requests inherit it. That is the deal on offer, and it works well against targets that do not keep per-address grudges. What Node4's shared proxies are and how they are packaged is on the shared proxies page.

On a dedicated proxy, one customer uses the address at a time. From the moment it is yours, the record it builds is yours, which matters wherever the target binds state to the address (logged-in sessions, carts, anything where the site remembers the IP), because an address presenting one customer's behavior looks coherent in a way a many-tenant address cannot. Dedicated does not mean the address has no prior history; it means nobody else is adding to it now.

Delivery: static endpoint or gateway

A static endpoint is a specific address you hold. The dashboard lists a host and port for each one, every request through it exits from that address, and the address appears in your configuration, can be whitelisted with third parties, and accumulates your history.

A gateway is one fixed hostname in front of a pool. You configure one endpoint and never change it; the gateway chooses the exit for each connection. This is how rotation is packaged, and how residential access is packaged, since a pool in constant flux cannot be sold as fixed addresses. When a workload needs the same exit across several requests, gateways offer session pinning, covered in sticky versus rotating sessions. The rotating products Node4 runs on this model are on the rotating proxies page.

A static endpoint concentrates your history onto one address a target can profile; a gateway spreads it thinly across a pool. Which is better depends on the workload.

Mobile, for completeness

You will meet a fourth source elsewhere: mobile proxies, whose exits sit on cellular carrier networks. Their distinguishing property is carrier-grade NAT: carriers place large numbers of subscribers behind each public address, so a target that blocks one risks blocking many real customers and calibrates accordingly. Node4 does not sell mobile proxies; the category is described here so the label is not mysterious.

How a target combines the three

Real defenses are layered. The first layer is the registration lookup (ASN, hosting versus eyeball, country): static, cheap, and decided before your request is read. Your proxy's source is your position at this layer. The second is per-address reputation, shared feeds and the target's own memory of what each address has done; tenancy and delivery both live here, because they determine what history an address carries into the next request. The third is behavioral (request rate, header consistency, TLS fingerprint, timing), and no proxy type addresses it: a residential exit issuing forty requests per second is still a program. That is why the type question is necessary but not sufficient, and why why is my IP getting blocked is the companion to this article.

Where this leaves you

Source determines how an address is classified, tenancy determines what history it carries, and delivery determines how that history is distributed. Which to buy depends on what your target checks, which choosing the right proxy type works through. If you would rather get a working baseline first, the quick start guide gets a first verified request through in about ten minutes.