GLOSSARY
Residential proxy
A residential proxy sends your traffic through an IP address that a home internet provider assigned to a household. To a website, the request appears to come from an ordinary home connection in a particular country or city.
Why it matters
Many websites treat traffic from hosting companies with suspicion but accept home addresses, so residential proxies are used for checking localized content, ad and price verification, and research. They cost more than datacenter proxies, are typically billed by data, and are slower. How the addresses were sourced is an ethical question: reputable networks say the device owners knowingly agreed.
In practice
Test what you receive. The IP lookup should show a home provider as the owner, and the VPN detector should not label it as hosting. Providers may mislabel datacenter addresses as residential. Read our guide on residential and datacenter proxies and the residential proxy page for pricing models and red flags to look for.
Related terms
- Datacenter proxy: A datacenter proxy runs on a server in a hosting facility, so its IP address belongs to a hosting or cloud company and not to a home or mobile provider.
- Mobile proxy: A mobile proxy sends traffic through a device or modem connected to a mobile carrier's network, so websites see an address from a cellular provider.
- Rotating proxy: A rotating proxy gives you a different IP address from a pool, either on every request or at set intervals, while you keep using the same connection details.
- ASN: An ASN is a unique number assigned to a network that manages its own routing on the internet, such as an internet provider, a cloud company, a university or a large business.