Glossary

ISP

In scraping, ISP usually refers to an ISP proxy: an IP address announced by an internet service provider but hosted on fast server infrastructure. It sits in the middle between datacenter and residential proxies: cleaner reputation than datacenter in many cases, but cheaper and more stable than true residential traffic.

Examples

A common production setup is to use ISP proxies for targets that block datacenter IPs quickly but do not require full residential rotation.

  • Good fit: ecommerce pages, search result pages, account-less browsing flows
  • Less ideal: heavily fingerprinted consumer flows that expect real household traffic patterns
curl "https://www.scraperouter.com/api/v1/scrape/?url=https://example.com" \
  -H "Authorization: Api-Key $api_key"

In practice, teams often route traffic like this:

  • Datacenter: cheap bulk jobs where some blocking is acceptable
  • ISP: medium-to-hard targets where you need better IP reputation without residential cost
  • Residential: hardest targets, login flows, aggressive bot systems

Practical tips

  • Don't treat ISP proxies as magic. They help with IP reputation, but they do not fix bad headers, broken session handling, or obvious automation patterns.
  • Use them when datacenter IPs burn too fast and residential is too expensive for the volume.
  • Watch the tradeoff: ISP IPs are often more stable and faster than residential, but the pool is smaller, so overusing the same ranges can still get you flagged.
  • Pair better IPs with basic scraping hygiene: realistic headers, cookie continuity, sane request pacing, retry logic.
  • If you're running mixed workloads, route by target difficulty instead of paying ISP rates for everything.
  • If you use ScrapeRouter, this routing logic is the whole point: you don't want application code deciding proxy type one target at a time forever.

Use cases

  • Price monitoring: product pages where datacenter IPs get blocked fast, but full residential traffic is overkill
  • SERP collection: search pages that need cleaner IP reputation and consistent performance
  • Marketplace scraping: category and listing pages with rate limits and moderate anti-bot controls
  • Session-based browsing: flows where you want the same IP to persist longer without the churn of residential networks
  • Cost control in production: workloads that need a better success rate than datacenter, without paying residential pricing across the board

Related terms

Proxy Residential Proxy Datacenter Proxy IP Rotation Rate Limiting CAPTCHA Fingerprinting Session