When it comes to the legitimacy of proxies, Residential proxies are the most sought proxies. Their legitimacy provides many advantages, such as least likely to get blocked by target websites when implementing web scraping activities and assessing geo-restricted websites.
It would be worthwhile to investigate where the proxy providers acquire their IP addresses in order to educate end-users like you on the whole process.
But first, let’s get a brief understanding of how residential proxy servers work. When you access the internet via a residential proxy, you will first connect to your proxy provider’s server. Then this provider chooses a residential IP at random or based on some guidelines. Then all your requests will be routed through this residential IP address.
Now let’s look at the criteria on how your proxy provider chooses the residential owners and assign them with IP addresses to route your requests through them.
First of all, when it comes to Residential proxies, you must keep in mind that you are using someone else’s computer network to fulfill your online browsing needs. In doing so, you will be using their bandwidth and hardware resources. The residential owners will allow the customers of the proxy service providers to browse the internet only after becoming part of the residential proxy network. They would need to first install the apps on their devices provided by proxy service providers.
So as you can see, there are three major parties involved in the IP acquisition process:
As far as the IP acquisition process is concerned, there must be a fair model at the very least to satisfy all these parties. Such a model should be transparent among parties where they need to document any formal agreements and ensure that the processes are implemented with appropriate consent. The acquisition process must also ensure that the residential proxy owners are rewarded and appreciated for their services.
The proxy industry, being relatively young, does not possess any standard mechanisms on the IP acquisition process. In the following section, we will look at some ethical ways certain proxy providers acquire their Residential IPs.
So as you have discovered in the last section, transparency and treating every party equally are critical to a successful residential proxy acquisition from third parties.
Following are the significant ways in which the proxy providers acquire residential proxies:
The below two procedures that the proxy provider uses to acquire residential proxies are unethical, and we do not encourage them. The reason for including them is just for your information. Be wary of such acts.
In addition to all the above, there is also the IP leasing process.
Now you have discovered how residential proxies are acquired. In order to get a fair deal to all the parties involved, we would like to recommend you to get your residential proxies from providers who practice ethical means and ways of acquiring them. It would also be ideal for the proxy providers to have a transparent communication process between them and the residential proxy owner.
