A residential proxy is an intermediary server whose IP is of residential origin — it’s an IP that is assigned by an internet service provider to a home. This distinguishes it from datacenter proxies, whose IPs originate from datacenters; and mobile proxies, whose IPs originate from mobile carriers.
Like all proxies, a residential proxy forwards your internet traffic on your behalf and relays the responses it receives back to your device. In doing so, your connection appears to be coming from the proxy.
In this article we’ll discuss how residential proxies work, what they’re most commonly used for, examining their pros and cons, and exploring some of the ethical considerations when buying one.
How Do Residential Proxies Work?
Like other proxies, residential proxies work by forwarding your traffic to the server rather than directly to the internet. The proxy server then forwards your request and relays the website’s response to your device.
- Routing Traffic: When you make a web request, it is sent to the proxy server, which forwards that request to the target website for you.
- Website Interaction: Your request is received by the website from the proxy’s IP address. From the website’s perspective, the connection is coming from the IP and geolocation of your residential proxy.
- Proxy Forwards Response: The proxy receives the response from the website and then forwards it back to your device, completing the request-response cycle.
By using a residential proxy, your traffic will mimic that of a user accessing the internet from their home, which comprises the overwhelming majority of all internet traffic. This creates a more authentic online experience, offering you anonymity without interfering with your browsing.
Residential Proxy Use Cases
Residential proxies can be used for a wide variety of use cases, primarily driven by online automation. Proxies serve one of two main functions. The first is to offer anonymity to the user. By using the IP of a proxy one can act online privately. This allows you to bypass IP bans and bypass geo-restrictions.
The second is to facilitate web automation at scale, to spread a user’s automated requests over multiple proxies at once. This mimics more realistic user behavior, i.e. If a website considers 10 requests per minute on average the normal behavior of a regular user, using five proxies allows you to send 50 automated requests in the same span of time without triggering a website’s antibot features.
A good example of this is web scraping, the most common use case for residential proxies. Web scraping is the process of retrieving data from websites and extracting useful or relevant information from them. It can include any information on a website.
Low-intensity web scraping can be done without a proxy, but as the number of requests to a website increases, so does the need for a proxy. As illustrated above, if the average user makes 10 requests a minute, a script that makes 500 requests a minute will be flagged and blocked.
Pros and Cons of Residential Proxies
As anti-bot measures become more sophisticated, the need for residential proxies continues to increase as a tool. Let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of residential proxies.
Advantages of Residential Proxies
- Scalability: Residential proxies are easily scalable by just adding another one to the pool.
- Large proxy pool: Because residential IPs are so ubiquitous worldwide, there is an immensely large pool of IPs to pull from.
- Diverse geolocations: Residential proxies can be created anywhere in the world, which means one can acquire a proxy from essentially anywhere.
- Speed and reliability: Because residential proxies are much less likely to be flagged, they’re more reliable when being used. Their speeds are also consistent.
- Cost for light use: Charges for proxies is usually on a per-GB basis, which means that if you’re not using much data, it’s very convenient to get one for your purposes.
- Matches normal user: A residential proxy, unlike a datacenter proxy, deviates the least from a website’s expectation of a “normal” user surfing the internet from home
Disadvantages of Residential Proxies
- Cost at scale: Most residential proxy providers charge per GB used, which can accumulate quickly when using large amounts of data.
- Lack of transparency: Many proxy providers are not transparent about the source of their proxies. There have been cases in the past where a proxy provider built their pool of IPs through illegal means — using malware to infect computers whose owners are unknowingly part of the pool.
- No guarantee of quality: Residential proxies, particularly shared proxies, come with no guarantee of quality. Because providers rely on volume, any one IP might have been flagged by whatever website you intend to scrape.
Unless your automation activities involve websites that have very few anti–bot checks in place, a residential proxy is generally the first step in anonymizing yourself. While you can’t rule out bans entirely, and large data requirements will get expensive, residential proxies are disposable, easily replaced, and convenient.
What Is the Origin of Your Residential IP Address?
Residential IPs are any originating from a home router, as assigned by an ISP. The ISP is assigned a range of IPs by one of five regional Internet registries, international organizations that between them organize the distribution of IPs worldwide. The ISP then distributes over all its customers such that each home has a unique public-facing IP at any given time. Any device on your home network will use this IP.
Devices that use your home router include:
- Home computers
- Smart devices & appliances
- Gaming consoles
- Printers, cameras, etc.
- Phones on WiFi
Network access translation, or NAT, is a way ISPs conserve IPs. To combat IPv4 exhaustion, ISPs use NAT to bundle private networks together, allowing them to all share a single unique IPv4. All the devices have a non-unique private IP that identifies them on their network for internal identification.
Not Always Ethically Sourced
Where there is demand for something, especially if it’s in a valuable or rapidly growing market, fraud and crime usually follow. Unethical practices, especially among proxy providers, is unfortunately no exception.
Where there is demand for something, especially if it’s in a valuable or rapidly growing market, fraud and crime usually follow. Unethical practices, especially among proxy providers, is unfortunately no exception.
In the proxy industry, this usually manifests as the unethical sourcing of proxies — most commonly residential. This involves spreading malware that turns a user’s computer into a residential proxy, without their knowledge or consent, and selling access to that proxy as if it were legitimate. One example of such a criminal network was dismantled by a joint law enforcement operation of US, Thai, German, and Singaporean agencies in May 2024. According to a US Department of Justice press statement, a botnet known as 911 S5 comprised more than 19 million IP addresses. Those IPs were in turn sold as if they were legitimately sourced residential IPs.
It’s important to stress that not all — or even most — residential IPs are sourced this way. Reputable proxy providers source their IPs ethically, with suppliers’ consent and knowledge. Look for providers with a transparent, publicly available sourcing policy that’s written in clear, unambiguous language.
Common Residential Proxy Protocols
Residential proxies can use a range of protocols to communicate with the wider internet. The following proxies are types defined by the type of protocol they can handle.
- HTTP
- HTTPS
- SOCKS5
The choice depends on what protocol you want to use. If you’re going to be using HTTP or HTTPS, i.e. web browsing, then an HTTP residential proxy would be appropriate. An HTTPS residential proxy can encrypt your data as it travels to and from the proxy server. By contrast, a SOCKS proxy can handle a broader variety of protocols. This makes them particularly suited to tasks like VoIP calls and peer-to-peer sharing
Types of Residential Proxies
Rotating Residential Proxies
There are many types of residential proxies, defined or named for their primary feature or purpose. Let’s break down some of the most common types; keep in mind that not all of these are mutually exclusive:
A rotating residential proxy is one that can change its IP on demand. An IP rotation can happen manually or automatically, occurring after a predefined number of requests or after a certain amount of time. More often than not this is a feature offered by a seller rather than being an inherent feature of a proxy. These proxies are most relevant when anonymity is paramount.
Static Residential Proxies
The opposite of the previous entry, the IPs of these proxies are designed to not change over time. ISPs assign new IPs to routers on a semi-regular basis, usually every few days or whenever your router reboots.
A static proxy holds onto its IP for as long as possible. It generally takes an agreement with an ISP directly to make this possible. When being able to assume a consistent identity is most important, a static proxy comes into play.
Shared Residential Proxies
These are proxies that are used by many people at once. You buy access to them — while you may be accessing one site, another user may be accessing another. As it relates to leasing proxies from a provider, a shared proxy is generally much cheaper but also more likely to have been flagged and blocked by various sites.
Dedicated Residential Proxies
This type of proxy is one that is only ever leased out to one user at any given time. This is the most common basis on which residential proxies are sold. When you lease a dedicated proxy you know you’re the only one using it at that moment in time. This privilege is usually reflected in the cost, as dedicated proxies are significantly more expensive than ones that are shared.
As mentioned, it’s important to keep in mind that these are not mutually exclusive categories. For example, you could have a dedicated static HTTPS residential proxy. This proxy would source its IP from a home, encrypt the traffic between client and server, have only one user at any given time, and maintain its IP for as long as possible.
Legality of Residential Proxies
As with all proxies, the legality of residential proxies varies from country to country. In general, using a proxy is not in itself illegal and depends primarily on what you’re using it for. Using a proxy to break the law is illegal. A proxy can offer many great benefits in terms of privacy and anonymity, but these same characteristics can be used for illegal and unethical purposes like hacking, spamming, and fraud. In some countries, proxies are illegal for their geo-hopping features used to circumvent internet censors.
Conclusion
In summary, a residential proxy is a proxy server that sources its IP from homes via ISPs. They support a variety of protocols and come with a variety of features and functions (static vs rotating) or leased on varying basis (shared vs dedicated).
Residential proxies’ primary purpose is to offer anonymity, privacy and geo-hopping options when browsing the web on the one hand and facilitating web automation on the other. Their key features include:
- Scalability
- Wide availability
- Speed & reliability
- Mimics real users
Choosing a proxy provider should not only be based on price, but also on whether or not they source their IPs ethically, from consenting and informed sources. You should also verify the reputation of the providers themselves, as unethical providers have been known to spy on their own users.
