# Residential vs ISP proxies: how to choose for your job

Both carry the name of a consumer internet provider, which is why targets trust them. The difference is the shape: a residential pool lends you millions of addresses for minutes each, an ISP proxy gives you one address for months.


## The short answer

Need many addresses that change, billed by traffic? **Residential.** Need the same trusted address for days or weeks, with unlimited traffic? **ISP.** Most other differences follow from that.


## Side by side

|  | Residential proxies | ISP proxies |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Where the IP lives | A real household device on a home connection | A datacenter line, registered to a consumer ISP |
| Address over time | Rotating, or sticky up to 24 hours | Static for the whole term |
| Pool or inventory | 70M+ addresses | 550K+ addresses |
| Speed | Household speed, varies by exit | Datacenter speed, stable |
| Targeting | Country, state, city, ASN per request | Country, and city where available, at order time |
| Billing | Per GB, $2.45 down to $0.95 | Per IP, from $0.99 a month, unlimited traffic |
| Best for | Scraping, SERP, ads, price monitoring | Accounts, logins, checkout, allowlists |


## Cost at three workloads

| Workload | Residential | ISP | Verdict |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 50 accounts, about 1 GB each per month | $87.50/mo (50 GB) | $44.55/mo (50 IPs, 90-day term) | ISP: cheaper and one stable address per account |
| 2 million pages a month at 150 KB | $400.54/mo (286 GB) | $79.20/mo (100 IPs) | Residential, unless the target tolerates about 670 requests per IP per day |
| 20 checkout or release sessions in parallel | Sticky sessions billed by traffic | $18.81/mo (20 IPs) | ISP: no address change mid-checkout |

Prices are this site's published grid: residential at the tier the monthly volume reaches, ISP on a 90-day term in the United States with its volume discount. Other countries use published multipliers.


## When residential wins

- Volume spread over many addresses: crawling, search results, ad verification, travel fares.
- Location precision per request: a different city or ASN on every call.
- Bursty or unpredictable workloads: traffic never expires, so nothing is wasted in a quiet month.


## When ISP wins

- Identities that must persist: social, marketplace and ad accounts.
- Flows that break on an address change: logins, carts, payments, limited releases.
- Heavy transfers on a fixed address: unlimited traffic makes the price per GB fall as usage grows.
- Partners that allowlist a source IP.


## Test both before you commit

1. Top up the $20 minimum and buy one gigabyte of residential traffic and one ISP address for 24 hours ($0.75).
2. Run the same flow through both: the same pages, the same account actions, at the same pace.
3. Count successes, CAPTCHAs and blocks per exit, and note the latency of each.
4. Price both at your real monthly volume with the tables above; the cheaper one per successful request wins.


## Mistakes to avoid

- Running a logged-in account on a rotating residential exit without a sticky session: the address changes between clicks.
- Scraping at volume through a handful of ISP addresses: each one burns faster than a pool would.
- Choosing ISP addresses in a different country from the accounts they serve.
- Comparing price per GB with price per IP without converting both to cost per successful request.


## Using both

Teams commonly run research and monitoring on the rotating residential pool and keep a fleet of ISP addresses for the accounts that act on the results. On HodlProxy both are paid from the same wallet with the same credentials.


## Questions

**Are ISP proxies residential proxies?**

They are registered to residential internet providers, so targets classify them as residential, but they are hosted in datacenters and do not rotate. That is why they are also called static residential proxies.

**Which is faster, residential or ISP?**

ISP: the address sits on a datacenter uplink. Residential exits run at the speed of the household connection behind them.

**Which is less likely to be blocked?**

For a single account, a clean ISP address used with care. For high request volumes, a residential pool, because the load is spread across many addresses.

**Can I rotate ISP proxies?**

Not per request: each address is fixed for its term. You can rent several and spread work across them, or use the rotating residential pool alongside.

Source: https://hodlproxy.com/guides/residential-vs-isp-proxies