Residential proxies
Traffic routed through addresses that belong to real consumer internet connections, which is why they are treated as ordinary visitors by most sites.
Pick this when
The target rejects hosting ranges but does not need a carrier address.
- Address belongs to
- A consumer ISP subscriber line
- Published as hosting
- No — that is the entire reason to buy it
- Latency
- Varies with the household connection behind the address
- Held for you
- No. An address can drop mid-session; the line is not ours to hold
How it works
A residential IP is allocated by a consumer ISP to a household connection. To a destination server it looks indistinguishable from an ordinary visitor, because in network terms that is exactly what it is.
That provenance is the entire value. Datacenter ranges are published and easy to classify; residential ranges are not, so sites that block by IP reputation have far less to work with.
The trade-off is that you are sharing infrastructure you do not control. Latency varies with the underlying connection, and a given address may go offline mid-session.
How it differs
Against its nearest neighbours, by name. If one of these describes your situation better, the row is a link.
Where it fits
Use it for
- Targets that classify and block datacenter IP ranges
- Collecting region-specific pricing, availability or search results
- Ad verification, where the ad server must believe it is serving a real consumer
- Anything where the request must look like it came from a household connection
Do not use it for
- High-throughput bulk transfer — a datacenter route moves the same gigabytes faster, for the same money
- Latency-sensitive work: you are traversing a consumer connection, so round-trip times are less predictable than a datacenter route
- Targets that never look at IP class — you would be accepting slower, less predictable routing for nothing. Test with datacenter first.
Every type bills at one rate, so moving up to residential costs you latency, not money. That also makes the datacenter test free — run it before you assume the IP class was ever the problem.
A real connection
One credential pair covers everything. Type, country, rotation and session all travel inside the username, so you never provision a second proxy user to change one of them.
user-USERNAME-type-residential-country-de-city-berlin-rotation-15City values come from the network’s own location list, with spaces written as underscores. Supply a state as well and the state wins — city is only read when no state is given.
Questions
- Do I get a dedicated IP?
- No. Residential addresses come from a shared pool, which is what makes them look like ordinary traffic. If you need one address held across a workflow, use a sticky session — that pins an address for the session without making it exclusively yours.
- Why am I still blocked on residential?
- Usually because the block was never about the IP. Request rate, a missing or inconsistent header set, and browser fingerprint mismatches all produce the same symptom. Change one variable at a time before concluding you need a different IP class.
- Which countries and cities can I target?
- A country code is required on every connection; a state or a city is an optional refinement on top of it, and the list of both is served by the network itself and shown in your dashboard — we would rather point you at the live list than quote a coverage number at you. ASN is a fourth parameter and works differently: the connection accepts an ASN number, but there is no browsable list of them anywhere, so it is only useful if you already know the one you want.
- Is residential legal to use?
- Using a proxy is legal. What you do through it is governed by our acceptable use policy and by the destination’s own terms — those are separate questions from the IP class you chose.
The same on every type
These four do not vary by proxy type, so they are worth stating once rather than six times. One balance covers all of it.
- Protocols
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5
- Targeting
- Country, then state or city; ASN by number
- Rotation
- Per request, sticky, or 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 / 60 minutes
- Rate
- $2/GB, sent plus received
Where this comes up
- Web scrapingMost scraping failures are not IP problems. Work out which one yours is before you change the IP class, because changing it is usually not the fix.
- Price monitoringA price is only meaningful alongside where it was observed. Get the location wrong and you are monitoring a number nobody is actually offered.
- Ad verificationAd servers make targeting decisions from the requesting IP. Verify from the wrong IP class and you measure a placement no real user ever saw.
- SERP and SEO monitoringThere is no single ranking for a keyword. There is a ranking in a place, and you have to look from that place to see it.
- Brand protectionInfringing listings are frequently hidden from the market where the brand’s legal team is sitting, and shown only where they are being sold.
How the connection behaves
Set alongside the IP class, not instead of it.