The proxy catalogue is built as a filter along three axes: country, channel type and traffic volume. Understanding how these relate saves time when choosing and explains why a needed geo is sometimes only partly available or missing entirely. Here is the logic behind country-based selection and the working options for when a country is not on the list.
How country-based selection works
The first filter in the catalogue is the country, and it determines which channel types even get shown. Within a country the list narrows by type: datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile. For some directions, targeting down to state or city is also available — but only where the operator has enough live addresses that the segment does not collapse to one or two IPs. The difference between the residential and mobile type within one country is covered in mobile versus residential proxies.
Why some geos have all four types and others only a few
The set of available types in a given country depends on the market, not the catalogue. Datacenter addresses show up wherever hosting infrastructure exists — practically any country. ISP proxies require a partnership with a local home provider willing to legally supply addresses for commercial use, and such agreements do not exist everywhere. The residential and especially the mobile pool depends on the density of live connections: a country with tens of millions of carrier subscribers has a stable pool that does not degrade under load, while a small country with one or two carriers may have a narrow mobile pool or none. That is why top directions show all four types, while rare geos usually offer only datacenter and, if lucky, residential.
What drives the price within one country
Datacenter and ISP addresses are billed monthly at a fixed price regardless of traffic. Residential and mobile channels are billed per gigabyte, and here the price rises with pool scarcity: the fewer live addresses an operator has in the country, the higher the price per gigabyte. Rough figures: a thousand text pages is about 1 GB, a thousand product-card checks with images is 3–5 GB, daily monitoring of a hundred pages is 1.5–3 GB a month. Savings come from disabling images and trackers in automation, not from picking the cheapest geo for a task it was not meant for.
Alternatives when a country is missing
The first option is a neighboring geo with a similar market profile: for tasks where regional context — language, currency, time zone — matters more than the country's passport, that is a workable substitute. The second is switching the channel type within the same country: if a mobile IP is unavailable, a residential or datacenter address for the same geo may be in stock, and for tasks without strict reputation requirements that is enough. The third is a datacenter IP as a temporary fix for tasks that do not depend on a home address's authenticity, until the needed type appears in the catalogue. What to pick when a cheap alternative genuinely is not an option is covered in cheap versus expensive proxies.
Verifying the assigned address before starting work
Once an address is assigned, three parameters are worth checking before a task starts. The country and, if it matters, the state or city — through any geolocation service, because a country code in a database response does not yet guarantee the region you need. The ASN — the autonomous system the address belongs to: a home provider for a residential address, a carrier for a mobile one, a hosting company for a datacenter one; covered in what an ASN is. And the address reputation — a high fraud score on a formally correct geo means the address has been used before, and some platforms will greet you with a captcha before the task even starts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the catalogue show a monthly price for one country and a per-gigabyte price for another?
This depends on the channel type, not the country. Datacenter and ISP addresses are always billed monthly as a dedicated resource. Residential and mobile ones are billed by traffic, because the address is issued per session and rotates rather than staying permanently assigned to you.
Can I get a guarantee that the assigned address has not changed since the last check?
For a dedicated datacenter or ISP address, yes — it stays with you for the whole paid period. For residential and mobile channels with per-session issuance, the address can rotate on timeout by definition, so checks should be repeated before every task run, not relied on as a one-time step.
Should I pick the cheapest geo if the task is not tied to a specific country?
Yes, if the task genuinely is not geo-sensitive — monitoring, technical requests, API calls. But the savings should come from dropping an expensive channel type, not a random country pick: a region that is a poor infrastructure fit sometimes delivers worse speed and stability, which costs more through retries.
The full proxy catalogue with filters by country, channel type and stock is in the proxy section, showing the current set of available geos and types for each.