ISP proxies: static addresses that look residential
What they are, why they sit between the two familiar products, and the volume at which they become the obvious choice.
Mara Lindqvist
Network engineering
23 Jun 2026 · 6 min read
An ISP proxy is an address registered to a consumer internet provider but hosted on datacenter infrastructure. To a WHOIS lookup it belongs to Comcast. To the network it sits on a ten-gigabit uplink in a rack. You get residential-looking provenance and datacenter performance.
The three properties that matter
- Static: the address is yours for the billing period and does not rotate.
- Fast: 0.22 s median, against 0.64 s for genuine residential, because there is no home connection in the path.
- Unmetered: billed per address per month rather than per gigabyte.
The volume argument
At $2.40 per IP per month, fifty ISP addresses cost $120. Moving a terabyte through them costs $120. Moving the same terabyte through residential at $3.20/GB costs $3,200. If your workload concentrates on a manageable number of targets, that arithmetic is difficult to argue with.
| Monthly volume | Residential | 50 ISP addresses |
|---|---|---|
| 100 GB | $320 | $120 |
| 500 GB | $1,600 | $120 |
| 2 TB | $6,400 | $120 |
| 10 TB | $32,000 | $120 |
The catch
Fifty addresses is fifty addresses
Rotation across a pool of millions makes any single address unremarkable. Fifty fixed addresses hammering one target are individually memorable, and once one is blocked it stays blocked until you replace it. ISP suits sustained moderate-rate work against tolerant targets, not aggressive crawling of hostile ones.
Where they are clearly right
- Account management, where the same address logging in repeatedly is expected rather than suspicious.
- Long-lived sessions that outlast the 120-minute sticky ceiling.
- Partner integrations that require you to declare a stable egress address.
- High-volume monitoring of a small target set that does not aggressively block.