Residential or ISP for drops: the decision in five questions

2026-10-16 · Bazyl

Residential and ISP answer different questions, and the drop tells you which one it's asking. Residential is a home connection in a country you choose, paid by the gigabyte, with a new IP per request or one held for up to 24 hours. ISP is a dedicated IP announced under our own ASN, one user per IP, paid per IP per month, the same address at every renewal.

Five questions decide it. The mistake I see most is answering only the last one, "which does the site prefer", and buying ISP for a drop that wants a home connection in a country we don't run ISP in, or residential for an account that has to look identical for a month.

1. Does the site want a home connection in a given country?

If yes, residential, because that is what the product is. Residential covers 190 countries, and the exit country rides the username as a token: -country-us for the United States, with optional city, ISP (ASN) and OS tokens behind it. ISP is two regions, Europe and Australia, and you buy a region, not a country or a city.

So a Pokémon Center drop in the United States is a residential question: one US home connection, held through the queue on the sticky port.

# one US home connection, held for the queue (port 4243, 60 minutes)
us-residential2.basilproxies.com:4243:USER-country-us-session-k4mz61pq-lifetime-60:PASS

An Australian retailer is the other case. Australia is one of the two ISP regions, so the same question has two answers there, and questions 3 and 5 decide between them.

2. One IP per request, or one IP held for the task?

Residential does both, and the port picks: 4242 rotates to a new IP on every request, 4243 holds one for the lifetime you set. ISP does one thing. One IP, yours, for as long as you pay for it, and it never rotates.

A monitor wants a fresh IP every poll so it never leans on one address: port 4242. Checkout wants one IP from cart to confirmation: port 4243 with a session token, or an ISP IP. The sneaker setup is both at once, rotating to watch and sticky to check out, from one credential:

# monitor: a new IP on every request
us-residential2.basilproxies.com:4242:USER-country-us:PASS

# checkout: one IP for 30 minutes
us-residential2.basilproxies.com:4243:USER-country-us-session-m2p8zq4r-lifetime-30:PASS

If every request in your task is independent, residential rotating is the answer and ISP is the wrong shape. If the task is one session, both products can hold it, and the next question splits them.

3. Does the same address have to survive for weeks?

Residential sticky holds one IP for up to 24 hours: the -lifetime- token takes 1 to 1,440 minutes, and 1,440 is the ceiling. Change the session id and you get a fresh IP. ISP keeps the same IPs through every renewal, month after month, and one user per IP means nobody else is on them.

An account you keep logged in for a month, a storefront you check from one address every morning, anything where the site is meant to see the same visitor for weeks: ISP. A queue that opens at 10:00 and is done by lunch: residential sticky, and you'll never meet the 24-hour ceiling. Around 10 ms in-region on ISP is a pleasant side effect, not the reason to choose it.

4. How many identities, and what budget?

The two products price different things. Residential charges for gigabytes; ISP charges for IPs. That settles the budget question before any rate does.

Residential, pay as you go, in US dollars as of 25 September 2026:

• 1 GB: $4.20 per GB, and it never expires
• 50 to 99 GB: $1.68 per GB; a 50 GB monthly plan is $1.34
• 1,000 GB and up: $0.96 per GB

Identities are free on residential. Every sticky string with its own session id is one, and the dashboard generates up to 100,000 lines at a time, so five hundred identities cost nothing per identity. You pay for the data they move.

ISP, per IP per month, minimum order 25 IPs, as of 25 September 2026:

• Europe: $1.08 per IP for 25 to 253 IPs, $0.96 from 254 up
• Australia: $2.30 per IP for 25 to 253 IPs, $2.00 from 254 up

So 25 European IPs are $27.00 a month and 25 Australian ones $57.50. Five hundred identities on European ISP are $480 a month before a byte moves. The flip side is a task that pushes a lot of data through a few addresses: that is priced by the address on ISP and by the gigabyte on residential, so run your own traffic through both rates before you decide.

5. Is the site hard on residential traffic?

Some retailers treat traffic from home connections worse than traffic from a dedicated IP on an ISP's network, and your own logs are the only honest source on which ones. When a site's answers to your residential exits are worse than its answers to a dedicated IP, run ISP for that site, in a region we have.

What ISP is, precisely: dedicated IPs announced under our own ASN (we don't own the hardware; the ASN is ours), one user per IP so nobody else can burn the address you're running, and renewals that change nothing. Cook groups take it one step further with a private Australian subnet behind a passcode, sold at checkout. Checkout Chefs runs its Australian IPs that way, and orders run from 25 to 508 IPs.

And what we answer for, on both products: the proxy being live and reachable. Not for it working on a particular site. An IP flagged by your own use isn't a service failure, and replacing it is a courtesy, not a promise. If a drop's outcome depends on a site's decision, no proxy product promises that decision, and I'd rather say so here than in a refund thread.

The five answers, together

• A home connection in a specific country, or city, ISP or OS targeting: residential.
• Every request independent: residential, port 4242.
• One session for hours: either. Residential sticky up to 24 hours, ISP for as long as you pay.
• The same address for weeks: ISP.
• Many identities, little data each: residential. Few addresses, lots of data: run both rates.
• The site is hard on residential traffic and sits in Europe or Australia: ISP.

Mixed answers are normal. The common sneaker setup is residential on 4242 for the monitor, then residential 4243 or ISP for checkout depending on question 5. Three things we don't do: ISP outside Europe and Australia, SOCKS5 on the residential pool, and a number for how many proxies a task needs, because your bot's documentation knows that better than we do.

When the fifth answer is yes, start on the ISP page: two regions, 25 IPs minimum, month to month, same IPs at every renewal.