What is the difference between residential and datacenter proxies?

Residential proxies route your requests through IP addresses that ISPs assign to real homes, so they look like ordinary users and are hard to block. Datacenter proxies use IPs owned by hosting providers: they are cheaper and faster but easier for sites to detect. The trade-off is cost and speed versus block rate. Running proxies yourself means buying pools, rotating IPs, and monitoring block rates as platforms adapt, which is ongoing operational work rather than a one-time setup. SocialCrawl abstracts proxies away entirely. You never pick a proxy type or manage a pool; you call an endpoint and the upstream handles IP rotation and blocks.