Residential proxies: what they are, how they work and where to buy from Garry's blog

Residential proxies are IP addresses issued by an Internet provider to ordinary users. Unlike server IPs, residential proxies  have a much higher level of anonymity, since these IPs are tied to a specific address (city, street, or even house). Thanks to this, no site will be able to detect that a proxy is being used and block it, since data exchange occurs as with a regular user’s computer.

Residential proxies offer a higher level of anonymity among all types of proxies. You can select the IP not only of a specific country, but also of a city, and in some cases, even an Internet provider.

In most cases, residential proxies come with rotation. This is a huge advantage over conventional ones. If you buy individual proxies, then you need to pay for each IP separately, but here you can get 100 – 500 proxies for the price of one individual one.

But not everything is as perfect as it might seem at first glance. Residential proxies also have one drawback. Its essence is that proxies are transferred from user to user (rotation principle). When you receive a new IP, it is generally unknown how and for what purposes the previous owner used it. Maybe it has already been sent to the spam database. But, of course, this happens very rarely.

One resident proxy with rotation can be used for a maximum of 30 minutes, and then it will automatically be replaced by the next one. If you need to change the IP more often, you can set the rotation to one minute or even configure it so that a new IP is issued with each request.

Areas of application of residential proxies:

1. Automatic collection of information from sites. They are used in cases where you need to regularly parse large sites. Residential proxies allow you to periodically change the IP address, which saves the scraper program from being blocked by IP.

2. Monitoring prices for goods. Most brands give their distributors recommended retail prices for goods, but not all partners faithfully adhere to them. Manufacturers have to monitor the market situation and use special software with resident proxies for this.

3. Website promotion. Nowadays, not a single SEO specialist can do without automated software. When you need to collect a huge amount of different data, you simply cannot do without a proxy. Starting from collecting the semantic core and up to monitoring the site’s position in search engines.

4. Maintaining multiple accounts on social networks. You can safely manage several accounts at the same time and are not afraid of bans and blocking from the social network, since the IP addresses are resident.

5. Registration of accounts for sale. As they say: demand creates supply! Smart people, seeing the need for a large number of different accounts on the part of arbitrators, quickly mastered this niche and automatically registered hundreds of accounts per minute through residential proxies.

6. For a wide variety of bots. Now almost every Internet user can create a bot. To do this, there are such systems that you don’t even need to know programming. Various Internet resources try to catch and block such bots, but this does not always work due to the use of proxies.