Shared vs dedicated proxies: what the higher price buys

A dedicated proxy is an IP address only you use for as long as you rent it; a shared proxy is the same kind of address, used by a few other customers at the same time. Shared IPs cost less, often much less, as the box above shows. Dedicated IPs buy you the address to yourself: while you rent it, nobody else’s traffic can get it slowed, challenged or blocked on the sites you use, though it may carry a history from before you. The choice is made on static IPs (datacenter and ISP proxies) and on rented mobile devices; rotating residential and mobile pools are shared by design.

Answer · The live comparison uses prices checked up to Oct 24, 2026; every figure in the text keeps the date it was checked.

What “shared” means

A provider that sells shared IPs gives the same address to several customers. You get your own login and your own connection, but the sites you visit see one address with everybody’s traffic behind it. How many customers share an IP varies by provider, and not every provider says. Some call a small group “semi-dedicated”.

A dedicated IP, also sold as a private IP, is assigned to you alone for the rental. Some providers use the words loosely, so read the plan rather than the label: the useful question is whether anyone else can send traffic through the same address while you rent it.

Why the history of an IP matters

Websites judge addresses by what came from them before. If another customer on your shared IP sends a burst of requests to the same site you use, that site may slow the address, ask it to solve challenges or refuse it, and you inherit the result. With a dedicated IP, what happens to the address while you rent it follows from your own traffic. Its past is another matter: the address may have been used by someone else before you, and sites may still remember that, so try it on the sites you need as soon as you get it.

It also matters when a site or service needs to recognise you: an account you sign in to from one address, or an API or firewall that only accepts allowlisted IPs. A shared address can be allowlisted too, but so are the other customers on it.

How they are priced

Both are rented per IP each month, often with unlimited traffic or a monthly allowance per IP. Shared IPs are usually sold in larger packages at a lower price per IP; dedicated IPs in smaller packages at several times the price. The box above prices 10 of each, for datacenter and ISP proxies. To compare more amounts, open the datacenter comparison or the ISP comparison, where “Refine” can require shared or dedicated IPs; plans whose provider does not say which are counted under neither.

Which one to buy

Shared is enough for public pages on sites that do not mind many requests from one address, for testing a provider before you commit, and for light work spread over many sites. At a few cents to a dollar or so per IP, a shared package also makes a cheap first test.

Dedicated is worth paying for when an address must be yours: accounts you manage, allowlisted connections, long sessions, or a target where a single bad neighbour would cost you more than the difference in price.

If you need many changing addresses rather than a few fixed ones, neither is the right product: a rotating residential pool is (static vs rotating proxies).