Glossary · Proxy types
Residential proxy
A proxy that routes your traffic through an IP address assigned by an internet service provider to a home connection, so requests look like an ordinary person browsing.
A residential proxy borrows an IP address that belongs to a real household internet connection, handed out by a consumer ISP like Comcast, Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom. Because that address is indistinguishable from any other home user on the same network, traffic routed through it carries the trust a datacenter address never gets.
That trust is the entire product. Sites that quietly rank or block visitors by the reputation of their network treat a residential IP as a genuine customer, which is why residential proxies are the default choice for reading localised prices, checking search results the way a local sees them, or gathering data from sites that reject obvious automation.
The trade-off is supply. Home addresses are not infinite, they change hands, and any single one can drop off the network when the household disconnects, so residential pools are billed by traffic rather than by a fixed address and the honest way to size one is by how many distinct addresses are live right now, not a headline pool number.
How HProxy handles it
Our checker network re-verifies residential endpoints continuously rather than trusting a supplier's claimed count, because a pool number and a live-right-now number are rarely the same figure.
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