Proxy types: mobile, residential, datacenter

Proxy providers sell three fundamentally different products, and the main difference between them is not speed but who owns the address. That is what drives both the price and the way a platform looks at your account. Below: how the types differ, what rotation and a sticky session are, which protocol to choose and where people most often trip up during their first setup.

Datacenter

These addresses belong to hosting companies and cloud providers, and they are issued in whole subnets. They are the cheapest, the fastest and the most stable. The downside is that datacenter ownership is easy to look up in public databases: any service can see that the request came from a server rack rather than from a home subscriber. For scraping, availability checks and utility work that is perfectly fine. For social media accounts it is the riskiest option, especially if other farms have already worked from neighboring addresses in the same subnet.

Residential

These are the addresses of home subscribers on ordinary internet providers. From the platform's side such a request is indistinguishable from one sent by a home computer. Residential proxies cost more than datacenter ones, can be slower and less consistent in speed, but they carry noticeably more trust. For most farms they are a reasonable compromise between price and peace of mind.

Mobile

These are carrier addresses handed out over 4G or 5G. What makes them special is that a carrier shares one external address with a large number of subscribers: thousands of real people normally sit behind a single mobile IP. Because of that, platforms treat mobile addresses more gently - blocking such an IP outright is too expensive for them. Mobile proxies cost more than the rest and are usually slower, but they almost always come with a link that changes the address on demand. For social media work this is the top shelf.

Rotation and sticky sessions

Rotation means changing the external IP. It comes in two flavors, and mixing them up is expensive.

• Rotation per request or on a short timer. The address keeps changing, sometimes on every connection. Fine for data collection, but not for an account: the service sees a user hopping between countries inside a single session.
• Sticky session. The address stays with you for several minutes or tens of minutes. That is what an account needs: login, feed and video upload all happen from one address.

The practical rule: hold a sticky session for the whole time you work with an account, and change the address between sessions rather than inside them. Lusiesta Studio has no scheduled IP rotation: the link from the Rotation link field is called only right before a video upload, and only if the Mobile proxies toggle is on in the publication form. Without a link, or with the toggle off, the address stays whatever the provider gave you.

SOCKS5 or HTTP

Every row on the Proxies page has a Type field with two values: SOCKS5 and HTTP. You switch it by clicking the cell itself, and for several devices at once use the Change type button on the toolbar above the table.

• SOCKS5 - a lower-level protocol that does not inspect the traffic and is not limited to HTTP. It is the usual pick for phones, which is why it is the default.
• HTTP - choose this if your provider issued HTTP access specifically. The same proxy often has different ports for different protocols, and a port pasted under the wrong type produces the error "connection refused (port closed)".

Next to the type there is a UDP toggle. It enables UDP traffic if your proxy supports it; with the toggle off, only TCP is used. If the provider never promised UDP, leave the toggle off - otherwise you risk a row that looks perfectly fine and a phone that stays silent.

Authorization: password or whitelist

Access to a proxy is granted in two ways, and that determines what you fill in the table.

1. Login and password. Fill in the Login and Password fields in the device row. For a farm this is the most convenient option: access does not depend on where you connect from, and moving to a different internet connection breaks nothing.
2. IP whitelist. Login and password stay empty, and instead you allow the addresses you may connect from in the provider's dashboard.

The whitelist hides a trap that is easy to miss. The Check all button goes through the proxy from your computer, while the phone connects on its own, over its Wi-Fi or mobile data. Those are two different external addresses. If only the computer's address is whitelisted, the check will be green while the phone gets no internet at all. Add both exits, or switch to login and password authorization.

How to choose for the job

• Warmup and uploads to social media - mobile, or residential on a tight budget.
• One address per device, not a shared pool for the whole farm. Why this matters so much is covered in Why every device needs its own proxy.
• Match the proxy geo to the account geo and to the language of your content.
• Keep the session sticky and rotate between sessions, not on every request.
• Leave datacenter addresses for utility work where platform trust is not required.
• Before buying a large package, take one or two addresses for a test and run them through Check all and an apply to a phone.

Once you have picked a type and have the provider's details at hand, move on to How to add and apply proxies.