What is the difference between Datacenter and Residential proxies?

Web Scraper Cloud supports both Datacenter and Residential proxies. The best choice depends on the target website, required location, and how the website responds to each proxy type.

Datacenter proxies

• Use IP addresses from datacenter and hosting infrastructure.
• Are generally faster.
• Work well for general-purpose scraping.
• May be blocked by websites that restrict datacenter traffic.

Residential proxies

• Use IP addresses from consumer internet service provider networks.
• Can be better for websites that restrict Datacenter traffic.
• Provide more country and location options.
• Can add some latency compared with Datacenter proxies.

Which proxy should I use?

Start with the proxy configuration that gives you reliable access to the target website.

If a website returns Access denied, 403, CAPTCHA, browser-verification, or similar blocked pages while using a Datacenter proxy, try a Residential proxy instead.

If the website returns different content depending on location, choose a proxy country that matches the region you want to scrape.

Test after changing proxies

Changing the proxy type or country can affect currency, language, prices, availability, regional catalogs, consent screens, or page structure. Run a Test scrape after changing the proxy configuration and confirm that the expected page and data are returned.

See the Proxy configuration documentation for more information.