Residential proxy

A residential proxy routes your internet traffic through a device sitting on a home internet connection, so the site you reach sees an IP address that belongs to a consumer internet provider rather than to you or to a hosting company. The exit point is somebody's household broadband line.

Why it matters when you buy proxies

The appeal is the owner of the address. When a site looks up the ASN behind your IP and finds a consumer broadband provider, the address reads as a household rather than as a server. That is a large step up in trust from a data center range.

Two things to check before you buy. First, most residential providers bill by the gigabyte rather than by time, so a scraping job that pulls images can cost far more than the sticker price suggests. Second, the addresses usually come from a shared pool, which means the IP reputation you get is whatever the previous user left behind.

A concrete example

Checking how a retailer's prices differ by city is a good fit for residential addresses: the requests are small, the traffic is read-only, and the site expects to see shoppers on home connections. Running a long-lived logged-in account is a worse fit, because the address underneath you can change or be recycled to somebody else.

For a side-by-side of the two types — including who each one actually suits — read mobile proxies vs residential proxies.