Skip to content

Guide

Residential proxies

A residential proxy routes your request through an IP address that a consumer internet provider assigned to a real home connection. To the site receiving it, the traffic originates from an ordinary household, because in terms of the address, it does.

Why they are rarely blocked

Blocking a residential range means blocking real customers. Sites know this, so residential addresses get far more benefit of the doubt than any hosting range, which is the entire reason the category exists and the entire reason it costs more.

The trade is speed and price

Traffic goes through a real consumer connection, so throughput is lower and less predictable than a data centre link. Billing is per gigabyte rather than per address, because what you are buying is passage rather than a machine.

Rotating and sticky both available

Rotating gives a different address per request, suited to crawling. Sticky holds one address for a set window, which is required for anything session based. Both are available on the residential pools over HTTP and SOCKS5.

Targeting down to city

Country targeting is standard, which matters for local search, regional pricing and anything that varies by market.

What to buy

Buy residential when datacenter gets blocked, or when the data you want is geo dependent. Metered, per gigabyte, and it does not expire.

Common questions

What makes an address residential?

It is assigned by a consumer internet provider to a household rather than to a server. That is the whole difference, and it is why the class costs more. A site that wants to tell visitors from infrastructure apart is looking at exactly this, so a residential address carries trust that a datacenter address cannot buy at any speed.

How long can I keep the same address?

Up to six hours here, or you can let it rotate on every request. Hold a session when the work spans several pages that must agree with each other, such as a cart or a signed in flow. Rotate when each request is independent, because rotating spreads the work and keeps any single address from carrying an unnatural pattern.

Is residential always the right choice?

No, and it is the most over bought pool for that reason. It is the right choice when the target inspects the address, and an expensive habit everywhere else. If a datacenter request already succeeds against your target, residential buys you nothing except a larger bill.

Try it against your own target

Metered bandwidth is billed per gigabyte and does not expire, so testing a small amount against the site you actually care about costs very little. See what the network covers if you have not seen it.

More guides