A residential proxy is an IP address issued by an internet service provider (ISP) to a real home internet connection, rather than a data center. Because residential IPs look identical to ordinary consumer traffic, they're much harder for websites to detect and block than datacenter proxies, making them the standard choice for scraping sites with aggressive anti-bot protection.

Residential proxy networks draw their IPs from real consumer internet connections rather than a data center, which gives them a legitimate-looking origin: real geographic location, real ISP ownership, and none of the recognizable IP-range fingerprints that flag datacenter traffic. The tradeoff is cost and speed; residential IPs are typically priced by bandwidth (per GB) rather than flat per-IP, and routing through a real consumer connection is inherently slower and less consistent than a dedicated datacenter link.

Types of Residential Proxies

  • ISP (static residential) proxies, IP blocks leased from internet service providers and hosted on servers (see ISP Proxy)
  • Peer-to-peer residential proxies, sourced from real users who opt in (often via a free app or SDK) to share their bandwidth in exchange for a reward

Residential IPs also rotate through a carrier's own dynamic allocation cycle even without a provider forcing a new session, so the same physical IP a scraper used yesterday may belong to a different real household today.

  • Datacenter Proxy
  • ISP Proxy
  • Mobile Proxy
  • IP Rotation