Residential proxies explained

What a residential proxy is

When you visit a website through a residential proxy, the site sees the address of a real home connection, in a specific country and often a specific city, instead of your own. The address is registered to a consumer internet provider, not to a hosting company. That is the defining feature, and it is what the price pays for.

Providers usually sell access to a large pool of these addresses rather than one fixed address. You connect to a gateway, and the provider chooses an address from the pool for you.

How it works

Your request goes to the provider's gateway, which forwards it to a device on a household connection. That device makes the request to the website and sends the response back along the same path. Because the last hop is a real home connection, the site's request comes from a consumer network.

You choose the country, sometimes the region or city, and whether the address should rotate on every request or stay the same for a set period (a sticky session). Pools change constantly because the devices behind them come online and offline.

Pros

• Addresses belong to consumer networks, so they are less likely to be rejected by sites that filter hosting ranges.
• Wide location choice, which helps for checking localized content, prices and ads.
• Large pools make it easy to spread requests across many addresses.

Cons

• Higher cost than datacenter proxies.
• Speed and reliability depend on a household connection that you do not control.
• Addresses can disappear mid-session when a device goes offline.
• Sourcing can be unclear. Ask how the provider obtains its addresses and whether device owners knowingly agreed.
• Some sites forbid access through proxies. A residential address does not change the terms you agreed to.

How residential proxies are usually priced

Residential proxies are most often billed by bandwidth, per gigabyte transferred, because every request uses a real person's connection. Small plans cost more per gigabyte than larger ones in many pricing schemes, and unused data may or may not carry over. Some providers instead sell a monthly plan with a data cap, or charge per port, which means per simultaneous connection slot.

Because billing is by data, heavy pages and large downloads get expensive quickly. Check whether images, scripts and failed requests count towards your allowance, and whether there are minimum purchases. We do not list prices on this site.

How to test one

Take the host, port and credentials from the provider and enter them in the proxy checker. It makes a test connection through the proxy and reports whether it works, how long it took, the country it exits in and its anonymity level. Then look at the exit address in the IP lookup and check the network owner. For a residential proxy, you expect a consumer internet provider or a mobile carrier. If it shows a hosting company, the product is not what it was described as.

Run the test several times, because rotating pools return different addresses each time. Check the country on each, not just the first.

Red flags when buying

• The provider cannot or will not explain how its addresses are sourced.
• Claims such as undetectable, never blocked or guaranteed success. No proxy can promise that.
• Unclear billing: no statement of what counts as billable traffic, or hidden minimums.
• No trial or refund policy, or a trial that requires you to submit identity documents without a clear reason.
• Exit addresses that turn out to belong to hosting companies when the product is sold as residential.
• No terms of service or acceptable use policy, or a policy that encourages ignoring site rules.

Read residential vs. datacenter proxies for a wider comparison. Provider comparisons will be added once we have tested them.