One IP might be used only by you — or by dozens of customers throughout a single day. The difference matters the moment someone else misbehaves: their actions can sour that IP’s reputation, and your perfectly legitimate requests get blocked right along with theirs. That is the real dividing line between shared and dedicated proxies.

Choosing a proxy type settles which kind of IP you use. Whether you share an IP or hold it exclusively is an orthogonal choice — and it drives stability, cost, and collateral blocks.

Two ideas

Shared proxies — one IP reused by multiple customers, at the same time or in turn. Cheaper and more abundant, but you can’t control what the others do with it.
Dedicated (private) proxies — an IP assigned only to you. Stable identity, and its reputation rests on your behavior alone — at a higher price and in limited supply.

In short: shared saves money; dedicated buys you the guarantee that your IP’s history is shaped only by you.

The trade-offs

Judge shared versus dedicated on these:

Collateral blocks — shared’s biggest risk: someone else torched the IP, and you go down with it.
Identity and reproducibility — when you must return as the “same person,” from the same viewpoint, dedicated holds steady.
Cost — shared is usually cheaper; dedicated carries an exclusivity premium.
Concurrency and scale — big-pool, high-volume jobs want shared’s headroom.
Isolation and privacy — for sensitive or compliance-conscious work, dedicated is cleaner.

“Shared vs. dedicated” lands differently by type

Don’t flatten it — the axis plays out differently across proxy types:

Datacenter proxies — the most common explicit shared/dedicated split, and the anchor for this post.
Residential proxies — a rotation pool is shared by nature (customers draw from it in turn); sticky or exclusive-style residential leans dedicated when you need a steady identity.
Static ISP proxies — typically handed out per IP, so effectively dedicated.
Mobile proxies — often run one exit per account, which reads as dedicated.

Choose by scenario

Job	Go	Why
High-volume public scraping	Shared	You’re rotating a big pool anyway; tolerate occasional rejections, prioritize cost
Long-lived logins / account management	Dedicated	Keep the identity stable — no shared collateral blocks
Ad verification, reproducible viewpoints	Dedicated	Results must be repeatable and trustworthy
High-value, low-frequency brand/price checks	Dedicated	One block costs you real rework — worth the premium
Broad, snapshot-style crawling	Shared	High volume, low dependence on any single IP

See datacenter proxies and the pricing page; for fixed-identity needs, you’ll most often land on static ISP proxies.

When shared is enough — and when you must go dedicated

Use one test: can you live with this IP’s history?

If you already rotate across many IPs, can re-fetch a dropped item from another IP, and the target is lightly defended — shared is fine, and the savings are real.
If a long-running chain must hold one identity (logins, accounts, reproducible verification or monitoring), a collateral block wastes the whole run and rework is expensive — go dedicated.

Put another way: shared bets on probability, dedicated buys certainty. The higher the data value and the steadier the identity you need, the more you should lean dedicated.

Common misfires

Assuming “dedicated = never blocked.” It only shields you from others’ actions — your own behavior can still get it flagged.
Conflating “dedicated” with “sticky sessions.” Dedicated is about whether you exclusively hold the IP; sticky is about keeping one exit within a session. Two different dials.
Buying a cheap shared pool with no failure monitoring, then discovering mid-run that the pool has been poisoned.

FAQ

Is dedicated always better than shared? No. Dedicated wins on stability and isolation but costs more and is scarcer; for high-volume, fault-tolerant, cost-first work, shared is the sharper buy.

Are residential proxies shared or dedicated? A rotation pool is shared by nature, reused by customers in turn. For long-term identity, move to exclusive-style static residential / ISP, which behaves as dedicated.

How do I tell if a shared pool is clean? There’s no absolute guarantee. Pre-check failure rate at low volume, see whether IPs auto-swap on failure, and watch how often a target rejects you. How shared/dedicated tiers and reuse limits are defined for your plan isn’t fixed in copy — confirm the specifics in your Thordata dashboard.

Can I mix shared and dedicated? Yes. A common setup runs bulk high-volume traffic on a shared pool and keeps a few critical, long-lived tasks (accounts, verification) on dedicated IPs.

Next step

First decide shared vs. dedicated with the “can you live with this IP’s history?” test, then start a free trial: run the same job on shared and dedicated at low volume against a real target, compare success rate and rework cost, and set your mix from there. Still deciding the proxy type or session strategy? See the sibling guides Which Proxy Type Should You Use? and Rotating vs. Sticky Proxies.