15% off your first purchase with code WELCOME15, up to 25 GB.

See pricing
ARC Proxies

Glossary · Proxies

Shared proxy

A shared proxy is a proxy exit IP that more than one customer uses, either at the same time or one after another, so whatever a site has learned about that address applies to everyone sending traffic through it.

Reviewed 30 Oct 2026

See alsoDedicated proxyProxy poolIP reputationRotating proxyCarrier-grade NAT (CGNAT)

Two kinds of sharing

  • Shared lists. A fixed set of addresses sold to several customers at once, usually per IP per month. Everyone hits the same targets from the same IPs at the same time.
  • Rotating pools. Exits drawn from a large proxy pool per connection or session. At any moment an exit is usually serving one session, but over a day it carries many customers' traffic.

What sharing changes

RFC 6269 lists the consequences of IP address sharing in general, and they carry over to proxies: a block aimed at one user lands on everyone sharing the address, and per-address counters add up everyone's requests. The same logic is why carrier ranges behind CGNAT are treated cautiously.

What sharing does not change is privacy of content. Under HTTPS each customer's traffic is its own TLS session; other users of the exit cannot read it.

When shared is the right choice

For most public-page collection, a shared rotating pool is the practical option: many locations, many addresses, and billing by traffic rather than by IP. ARC's residential and ISP pools work this way. Move a job to a dedicated proxy when a target must see one fixed address you control, such as an allowlisted API.

FAQ

Questions

Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.

Are rotating residential proxies shared?

Yes. Exits come from a pool that serves all customers, so an address you use this hour may have carried someone else's traffic earlier. That is what makes per-GB billing and wide location coverage possible.

Can another user's activity affect my results?

It can, through the address's reputation and through per-IP counters at the target. Rotation spreads that effect across many exits, and acceptable-use rules on the provider's side limit what others may do with the pool.

Is a shared proxy less secure than a dedicated one?

Not for the content of HTTPS requests, which is encrypted end to end between your client and the site. Credentials are per account, so other users cannot spend your bandwidth or see your traffic.

Are shared proxies cheaper?

Usually, because the cost of each address is spread across customers. On ARC the rotating pools are billed per gigabyte with no subscription, while dedicated static IPs are priced per IP per month.

Sources & review

Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.

  1. [1]IETF: RFC 6269: Issues with IP Address Sharing

In practice

Where shared proxy matters

ProductResidentialReal consumer IPs in 185+ countries with city targeting, rotating or sticky, billed per gigabyte with no subscription and no expiry.ProductISPDatacentre-hosted addresses registered to consumer ISPs — our fastest pool and lowest price per GB, for monitors, price feeds and plain HTML at volume.ProductStatic IPsDedicated addresses that stay yours, priced per IP per month with unmetered traffic — when a target needs to see the same IP every time.