Residential, Datacenter or ISP: Work It Out From Cost Per Successful Request

Almost every comparison of proxy types ranks them by price per IP or per gigabyte. That number decides nothing on its own. A datacenter IP at three cents that fails four times out of five is more expensive than a residential IP at thirty cents that works — and the arithmetic for working out which is which is short enough to do on a napkin.

The only number worth comparing

Take the amount you spent in a month and divide it by the number of requests that returned the data you wanted. Not the number of requests you sent — the number that came back correct, unblocked, and not a CAPTCHA page or a soft-blocked variant of the real content. That figure is cost per successful request, and it is the only one that survives contact with an actual workload.

It reorders the tiers dramatically. Price per IP flatters datacenter ranges because it hides the failure rate entirely. Once failures are in the denominator, a tier that looks ten times cheaper can turn out to be more expensive, and the reverse happens too: on undefended targets, residential IPs are simply money set on fire.

What you are actually buying in each tier

Datacenter addresses belong to hosting companies. The address itself is fine; the problem is that its autonomous system number announces where it lives. Any site that cares can buy a list of hosting ASNs for very little money, and most sites that are worth scraping have done so.

Residential addresses are consumer lines — the same connections households use. They carry no inherent signal of automation, which is what you are paying for. The trade is that they are slower, occasionally drop, and cost meaningfully more per unit.

Static ISP addresses are the hybrid: registered to a consumer internet provider, but hosted in a facility with real bandwidth behind them. They look residential to an ASN check and behave like a datacenter line in throughput and uptime. They also stay yours, which matters for anything with a login attached.

The arithmetic, worked through

Suppose you need one hundred thousand successful page fetches this month.

On datacenter IPs at roughly $0.03 each, against a target that blocks hosting ranges aggressively, a 20% success rate is optimistic. To land 100,000 successes you must send around 500,000 requests, and you burn through addresses as they get flagged. The invoice looks small. The engineering time spent rotating dead IPs, re-queuing failures and reconciling partial data does not appear on it at all.

On residential IPs against the same target, a success rate in the 90% range is ordinary. You send about 111,000 requests to get 100,000 back. You pay more per address and less per outcome, and — this is the part that gets left out — your data is complete, so nobody spends a day working out which rows are missing and why.

Now change the target to a site with no bot defences worth the name. The datacenter success rate jumps to 95%+, the residential premium buys you absolutely nothing, and the cheap tier wins on every axis. Same two products, opposite conclusion, and the only thing that changed was what you pointed them at.

Where the cheap tier genuinely wins

Datacenter proxies remain the correct answer more often than the residential sales pitch admits. Use them for internal testing and staging, for public APIs that publish rate limits and expect you to respect them, for uptime monitoring, for pulling documentation or open datasets, and for any target you have already measured as indifferent to your ASN. Volume without defence is exactly the case they were built for.

The mistake is not choosing them. The mistake is choosing them by default and then blaming the proxies when a defended target rejects everything.

The costs that never appear on the invoice

Three of them, in rough order of how much they hurt.

First, engineering attention. A pipeline that fails four requests in five needs retry logic, dead-IP detection, and someone watching it. That person costs more per hour than the entire proxy bill.

Second, silent wrongness. Blocks are the good outcome, because they are loud. The expensive outcome is a page that returns 200 with different content: default pricing, a stripped catalogue, a generic landing page. You record it as a success and make decisions on it for weeks.

Third, restarts. Long jobs that die partway leave you unsure what completed. Re-running from the beginning doubles the real cost of everything before the failure point.

How to measure this on your own traffic

Run the same thousand-URL sample through each tier before committing to either. Count three things separately: requests that returned an error, requests that returned a CAPTCHA or challenge, and requests that returned a page whose content differs from what a local browser sees. That third bucket is the one that decides the comparison, and it is the one almost nobody instruments.

Divide spend by the count of clean results in each run. Whichever number is smaller is your answer for that target — and the answer belongs to that target only. A pool that is correct for a defended marketplace is wasteful pointed at a public dataset, and running both is normal rather than indecisive.

922 S5 Proxy bills per IP rather than per gigabyte, which makes this measurement straightforward: the spend side of the fraction is a number you already know before the job starts, instead of one that arrives at the end of the month.

FAQ

Is residential always the safer choice?

Safer against detection, yes. Safer for a budget, no. On an undefended target it is a premium paid for nothing.

Why does static ISP cost more than datacenter if it sits in a facility?

Because the scarce part is the address registration, not the hardware. There are only so many consumer-registered ranges available to lease.

What success rate should I expect on a defended site?

It varies enough by target that any single figure would be misleading. Run the thousand-URL sample; a day of measurement beats a month of assuming.

Can I mix tiers in one project?

You generally should. Cheap IPs for discovery and link harvesting, residential for the pages that actually resist you.