What are residential proxies and why do you need them?
What are residential proxies Residential proxies are proxies that directly come from an ISP and are most often located on personal devices. Because the proxies are located on a personal device, unlike datacenter proxies, which are located at a data center, they are less likely to be detected as a proxy. Since the proxies are
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What are residential proxies
Residential proxies are proxies that directly come from an ISP and are most often located on personal devices. Because the proxies are located on a personal device, unlike datacenter proxies, which are located at a data center, they are less likely to be detected as a proxy. Since the proxies are not likely to be detected, you can keep sending requests to your target without getting banned.
Most residential proxies also allow you to choose a specific country or city to send your requests from. With datacenter proxies, this is not possible since they are located in the country of datacenter you bought them from.
How do residential proxies work
Residential proxies are easy to understand; at the bare basics, it’s a network of millions of residential IP addresses combined into a proxy network. In this section, we will explain it to you in more detail.
How a residential proxy works
When you send a request to a residential proxy, your traffic will get routed through a proxy located on a real device, which has an IP address of an ISP. Most of the time these IP addresses are located at real homes, this is why you are less likely to be blocked, because your target sees you as a regular user.
How the residential proxy network works
Now that you know how a residential proxy works, you can simply multiply the previous explanation, and you get the whole network.
Residential proxies often work with a rotating system, meaning every time you send a request to the residential proxy it will redirect you to a random new proxy, this way you will not get blocked from your target, if one of the proxies in the residential network is blocked, you will be given another proxy that works.
Comparison to other proxies
This is different from other proxy types, like datacenter proxies, which give you a static list of proxies that you can use.
Because you are always using the same proxies with datacenter proxies it’s easier for your target to detect you as bot traffic. Once you are blocked with a datacenter proxy, you will have to wait until your target unbans you to use the same proxy again.
Should you use residential proxies?
Finding the right balance
When choosing your proxy type, it’s important to choose the right proxy type, finding the balance between the cost you create and the time you waste. The cost of the proxies is often equal to the quality they provide:
- Choosing the more expensive option will result in fewer bans from your target website, thus saving you more time. This is because fewer people use the proxies.
- When you choose a cheaper type, it will result in you being banned more often from your target. This is because the affordable options are shared with more people or are located at a data center, which results in more bans.
Depending on your use-case and the security of the website you are targeting, the cheap option might not be the worst option.
It is up to you to find the right balance for your target website, and luckily for you, we offer both the more expensive type, residential proxies, and the cheaper alternative, datacenter proxies, and we are here to help you with choosing the best type for you!
When you should use residential proxies.
Residential proxies are the more expensive option but are less likely to be banned, you should choose residential proxies in one of the following scenarios:
- Your target website easily bans you when bot traffic is detected
- Your time is valuable, and you can not afford to be blocked for a long time
- You need proxies from a specific country or city which are not provided by datacenter proxies.
Other advantages of residential proxies:
- You get access to a pool of millions of IP addresses all around the world
- Your target does not know you are using a proxy, it thinks you are a normal user
When you should not use residential proxies.
Sometimes you might be better off with the cheaper option, like datacenter proxies.
Here are the scenarios you should not consider residential proxies:
- Your target is very unlikely to ban you.
- You use a lot of traffic and have a limited budget, residential proxies are often charged by your internet consumption.
- You need fast proxies; datacenter proxies are often faster because they are maintained by professionals in a datacenter.
Are residential proxies the right choice for my usecase?
You might not know if the above factors apply to you, and you are just wondering if residential proxies are the right choice for your use-case. We still suggest you do your own testing and use these recommendations as a guideline.
Residential proxies can be used for the following use-cases:
Website testing
Whether you are testing your own website or a website of a customer, residential proxies are a good proxy to stress-test the security of your website and make sure the spam protection is working correctly.
SEO monitoring
There are multiple reasons why you might want residential proxies for SEO monitoring. Search engines do not like being scraped and browsing from a different IP every time you send a request will prevent you from being blocked and being asked to complete a captcha. Another reason you might want residential proxies for SEO monitoring is to browse from different GEO locations and keep track of your ranking in those areas.
Ad verification
One of the obstacles of ad verification you will confront in the present industry is IP ad fraudsters blocking your IP address. Even an IP ban of minute scale can result in an ad verification service unworthy because you won’t be able to access fraudsters’ sites. This is exactly how the gambling field has ingrained into the residential proxy market. Residential proxies are a good way to prevent you from being blocked from verifying ads.
View botting youtube/twitch
Youtube and Twitch easily ban IP addresses from botting views, or they count the view temporarily and remove them later once the views are analyzed. With residential proxies, you can make sure the views are there to stay.
Web scraping
Residential proxies are a good choice for high-value targets such as Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Aliexpress, and many more. Since these websites are subject to a lot of scraping practices you can be almost certain that they have invested a lot of time & money in preventing scraping activities. Because residential proxies provide a lot of IP addresses they are an excellent choice for scraping this type of target.
Brand protection
You want to make sure your trademarks and brand name get used in an appropriate way. This is why you should be monitoring other websites, to ensure that they do not abuse your trademarks. Residential proxies make sure that you resemble a normal user that is browsing the website.
Pricing of residential proxies
Residential proxies are most often priced by your internet consumption instead of by the number of proxies you get. If you use a lot of traffic, residential proxies might not be the right choice for you unless the cost can justify its outstanding quality that residential proxies provide compared to the alternatives. Here at ProxyScrape, we provide our residential proxies for $3 per gigabyte.
Learn more about our residential proxies here.
Conclusion
Residential proxies are proxies that are located on a normal device that has a residential IP address. Whether or not you should use residential proxies should be determined by your time and budget. Often they come at a higher price than their alternatives, and they work for almost anything you need them for, but you might be better off choosing an alternative to optimize your budget. If you have the budget available and you do not want to waste any time testing other proxies and being blocked by your targets you should definitely use residential proxies.