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 routes your traffic through an IP address that a consumer internet provider assigned to a home connection. Look that address up and the owner comes back as Comcast, Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom rather than a hosting company, which is the single fact the entire product rests on.
The trust follows from what a site can and cannot do about it. A datacenter proxy sits on hosting ranges that can be treated as suspect wholesale, because no ordinary customer browses from a rack. Consumer ISP ranges cannot be dismissed that way, because that is where the actual customers are. A destination facing a residential address has no cheap categorical signal to act on, so it has to judge the request on behaviour instead, and behaviour is something you control.
That is why residential is the default for anything geography-sensitive or automation-sensitive: reading the prices a local sees, checking search results as they appear in a given country, collecting from sites that reject obvious machinery. Not because it is faster (it is slower) or cheaper (it is not), but because it is the only type that does not lose before the request is examined.
The constraint is that you are borrowing something you do not own. Home connections belong to people who turn routers off, change providers and go on holiday, so an individual address is temporary by nature. This has two consequences worth internalising. Pools are billed by traffic rather than by address, because renting a specific household IP by the month is not a thing anyone can honestly sell. And a headline pool size describes everything ever seen, not what is reachable now.
Which makes sizing the one place buyers are most often misled. A number in the tens of millions is a historical total. The number that determines whether your job succeeds is how many distinct addresses are live in the country you need at the moment you run, and those two figures are rarely close. Any provider can quote the first. The second is the one worth asking about.
Because the addresses are temporary, the normal way to consume them is as a rotating proxy: one gateway, a different exit per request. When a task needs one address to persist you either hold one with a sticky session or move to an ISP proxy, which trades the borrowed household for a datacenter machine wearing residential registration and does not disappear when somebody unplugs a router.
Targeting is the last piece. A pool is only useful if you can ask it for a specific place, so residential is normally addressed by country, and often by city or by ISP, through the credentials rather than through separate endpoints.
How HProxy handles it
We re-verify residential endpoints continuously instead of trusting a supplier's claimed count, for exactly the reason above: a pool number and a live-right-now number are different figures, and only one of them affects your job. Targeting is expressed in the username on a single gateway, so a request for German traffic from Frankfurt is a credential like user-country-de-city-frankfurt rather than a different host to configure.
Frequently asked questions
Why are residential proxies billed per GB instead of per IP?
Because nobody can honestly rent you a specific household address by the month. The connections are borrowed and temporary: the person on the other end can change provider, reboot a router or go on holiday, and the address goes with them. Traffic is the only unit a provider can actually deliver against, which is why per-IP pricing belongs to ISP and datacenter proxies, where a machine in a rack really is reserved for you.
How big is the pool, and does that number matter?
Far less than it is used to imply. A headline in the tens of millions is a historical count of every address ever observed, and most of them are not reachable now. The figure that decides whether your job succeeds is how many distinct addresses are live in the country you actually need at the moment you run. Ask for that number, not the marketing one, and treat a provider that cannot separate the two as answering a different question.
Are residential proxies faster than datacenter proxies?
No, and they cannot be. A datacenter proxy runs on a machine sitting on backbone routes; a residential address is somebody's home broadband, with the latency and variability that implies. You buy residential for trust, and you pay for it in speed and price. If your target does not screen by network type, residential is the more expensive way to get a slower result.
Is using residential proxies legal?
Using a proxy is ordinary networking, and the question is really about what you do through it and where the addresses came from. The part worth scrutinising is the supply chain: whether the people whose connections carry your traffic knowingly agreed to that. What you do with the address is governed by the target's terms and by local law, which is a question for a lawyer rather than a glossary.
Rotating or sticky, which should I pick?
Match it to the task rather than to a preference. Stateless, high-volume, read-only collection wants a rotating proxy, because spreading requests across many addresses is what keeps any single one under a rate limit. Anything holding a login or a multi-step flow wants a sticky session, because a fresh IP mid-flow reads as a stolen session rather than as a returning visitor. If the task needs one address for weeks rather than minutes, you want an ISP proxy instead.
Can a site tell I am using a residential proxy?
Not from the address type alone, which is the point of it. It can still catch you on everything else: a browser fingerprint that contradicts the country the IP claims, a TLS handshake that belongs to a scripting library, request pacing no person would produce, or one household address suddenly carrying office-scale volume. Residential removes the cheapest reason to distrust you and leaves every other one intact.
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