Ports vs IPs
A port is a concurrent connection slot; an address is an identity. 6 of the 545 plans Proxy Compare prices are sold by port and 135 by address, read 5 Oct 2026. Ports cap how much you can do at once, addresses cap how many identities you can wear.
Why it costs you money
Ports and addresses get quoted interchangeably and they are not the same thing. A plan sold as twenty ports may draw from a pool of millions of addresses, and a plan sold as twenty addresses gives you exactly twenty. Reading one as the other overstates or understates what you are buying by orders of magnitude.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Proxy poolThe set of addresses a provider can route you through. The advertised size is a vendor claim nobody outside can verify.
- BackconnectOne gateway address that fans out to the whole pool behind it, so your code never handles an address list.
- Concurrency limitThe cap on how many requests you can have in flight at once. Often the real constraint on a scraping job, not price.
- Per-IP pricingBilling per address rented per month, with traffic uncounted. It cannot be honestly converted to a per-GB rate.
- Every term we define
Questions
What is the difference in what I am buying?
A port is a concurrent connection slot and an address is an identity. 6 of the 545 plans priced here sell by port and 135 sell by address, read 5 Oct 2026.
Which one does my job need?
Ports cap how much you can do at once; addresses cap how many identities you can wear. Many simultaneous requests from one identity needs ports. Many identities, each doing little, needs addresses.
Can I compare the two on price?
Not directly, because they meter different things. The only honest comparison is what your own job costs on each, which is what the calculators on this site are for.