What Are Residential Proxies And Why Do You Use Them

Where they come from

A residential proxy uses an IP address that a consumer internet provider handed to a household. Traffic routed through it leaves from that real connection, so the website sees an ordinary broadband customer rather than a server.

Why sites trust them

Every public IP belongs to an organisation, and that ownership is easy to look up. Addresses owned by hosting companies are the ones automation usually comes from, so many sites treat them with suspicion by default. Addresses owned by consumer ISPs belong to real people who buy things, read articles and click ads — blocking them costs the site revenue, so it doesn't.

What people use them for

• Collecting public data at a volume one address couldn't sustain
• Seeing prices, stock and offers exactly as a local shopper sees them
• Verifying that ads run where they were bought
• Managing several accounts without linking them by IP
• Testing a site's own geo-specific behaviour before customers hit the bug

Rotating or sticky

Both, depending on the job. Rotate on every request when you're crawling public pages. Hold a sticky session — minutes to an hour — when there's a login, a cart or any state the site expects to persist.

What they cost

Billing is per gigabyte, because you're using someone's real connection. That makes them the wrong choice for bulk downloads and the right choice for pages that would otherwise be blocked. A practical rule: try the cheapest IP type first, and move a job to residential only when it starts failing.

Choosing a provider

Ask how the pool is sourced and whether peers consent, how many IPs are available in the countries you actually need, whether city and ASN targeting are real, and how sticky sessions behave under load. Those four answers tell you far more than the headline pool size.