Dedicated IP vs Shared Proxy

Static-IP proxy services mostly sell you a slot on a shared exit. That is a genuinely different product from an address assigned to you, and the difference only shows up under the conditions you bought it for: a security review, an abuse complaint, a rate limit, or a vendor who checks. Here is what actually differs, what it costs across the market, and the cases where the shared version is the right answer.

The distinction in one paragraph

A shared static IP means your outbound traffic leaves from an address that other customers also leave from. It is stable, so it satisfies "give us an IP to allow-list" on the letter of the request. A dedicated address is assigned to you and carries only your traffic. Both give you a number that does not change. Only one of them gives you a number that means something about you.

What the market charges

This distinction is priced, and steeply, which tells you how the industry views it. QuotaGuard — the best-known name in this category — lists four tiers of QuotaGuard Static. Starter at $19, Production at $49 and Business at $89 each describe themselves as a "Shared static IP pair". Dedicated addresses appear only on Enterprise, at $219 a month: "Dedicated static IP pair." Its Shield line runs $29 / $59 / $109 shared and $269 dedicated.

Read from QuotaGuard's pricing page on 2026-09-17. Their dedicated tiers are a pair of addresses, not one, and include a managed proxy service — so it is not a like-for-like comparison with a single address, and we are not going to pretend it is. Check their current page before relying on any of this.

Two things follow. The first is that if you looked at a $19 or $49 plan and assumed you were buying a dedicated address, you were not, and their own page says so. The second is that a dedicated address is normally the top of somebody's price list.

What actually differs

Reputation is collective on a shared exit

Anti-fraud systems, rate limiters and email reputation services score addresses, not customers. On a shared address you inherit the aggregate behaviour of everyone else on it. That is invisible right up until the day a vendor starts refusing you and cannot tell you why, and you have no way to fix it because the cause is somebody else's traffic.

An allow-list on a shared address is not the control the vendor thinks it is

When a partner allow-lists your shared exit address, they have permitted every other customer behind it. Their security team believes they have restricted access to you. They have not. Whether that matters depends on how honest you want the integration to be; it will matter to an auditor.

The industry is explicit about this. Stripe's advanced access policies let you block traffic by source category, and the categories it names include public proxies and residential proxies. A payment company offering "block proxy egress" as a security feature is a clear statement about how shared proxy addresses are viewed by the people whose allow-lists you are trying to get onto.

Rate limits are shared too

Many APIs rate-limit per source address. On a shared exit, another customer's burst is your 429. This is the failure that is hardest to diagnose from your side, because your own request volume looks fine.

Attribution cuts both ways, and that is the point

A dedicated address points at you. If something goes wrong, the complaint arrives at you and you can fix it. That is precisely the property that makes an allow-list meaningful, and it is why a dedicated address is not an anonymity product. If you wanted to be hard to attribute, a shared pool is the correct choice and you should buy one.

When shared is the right answer

Often. Do not buy a dedicated address out of instinct.

• Scraping and data collection at volume. You want rotation and many addresses, not one. A dedicated address is the wrong shape.
• A vendor who only asks for stability, not for exclusivity, and where nobody will audit it.
• Development and staging. Pay for the property in production.
• Cost sensitivity where the risk is low. $19 shared versus $100–$219 dedicated is a real difference, and for a low-stakes integration the cheap answer is the right answer.

When dedicated is worth it

• A partner's production access depends on the address — a payment processor, a bank, a filing endpoint.
• You will face a security review that asks whether the address is exclusively yours.
• You need inbound as well as outbound. Shared proxies are an outbound product; you cannot be reached at a shared exit.
• You have been bitten by a reputation or rate-limit problem you could not diagnose.

Questions to ask any provider

• Is this address exclusively mine, in writing? Not "static" — dedicated. The two words are used interchangeably in marketing and they are not the same thing.
• Who announces the address block, and under what ASN? If they cannot answer, they are reselling and the answer is somebody else's.
• What happens if the address gets a bad reputation? Do I get a replacement, and how fast?
• Does inbound work, or is this outbound only?
• What is the actual uptime, measured, and where is it published? "99.9%" with no window and no incident list is a slogan.

Our answer to our own questions

We are one of the options here, so it is only fair to answer the list rather than pose it.

Exclusively yours: yes. One address, one customer.
Who announces it: we do. 23.187.152.0/24 under AS396500, our own autonomous system with our own RPKI ROA. You can verify that in a public routing database without asking us, which is the only kind of claim worth making here.
Bad reputation: email us and we will move you to a different address in the block.
Inbound: yes, both directions on the same address. That is unusual in this category — shared proxy products are outbound only.
Uptime: published, measured from outside our network, every incident listed including the ones we caused ourselves. We have no SLA and will not offer one before we have six months of measured history — 21 February 2027 at the earliest. The record is currently short and the page says so next to the number.

$20 a month for a dedicated address on TunnelNet Full, inbound and outbound. TunnelNet Business at $100 is the same address with a written one-business-day support commitment and onboarding done with a person. Against $219 for the usual dedicated tier, that is the comparison we would want you to make — and if a $19 shared plan does your job, buy that instead and spend the difference on something else.