Residential Proxy
A proxy that routes traffic through IP addresses assigned by ISPs to residential internet connections.
Residential proxies use IP addresses that ISPs assign to home internet subscribers. When you send a request through a residential proxy, the target server sees an IP registered to a real household - not a datacenter or cloud provider.
This matters because websites check the ASN (Autonomous System Number) of incoming IPs. Datacenter IPs trace back to AWS, Google Cloud, or hosting providers - known sources of automated traffic. Residential IPs trace back to Comcast, BT, Verizon - known sources of real users.
Residential proxy pools are built by routing traffic through real devices (with user consent, through opt-in software) or through ISP partnerships. The IP reputation comes from the fact that these addresses are actively used by real people for regular browsing.
The key advantages: high success rates on anti-bot protected sites, lower CAPTCHA trigger rates, and the ability to access geo-restricted content that blocks non-residential IPs.
The key tradeoff versus datacenter proxies: residential proxies are slower (you are routing through actual devices or ISP infrastructure) and more expensive per GB. For targets that block datacenter IPs, the higher cost is worth it. For targets that do not care about IP type, datacenter proxies are the faster, cheaper choice.
Where residential addresses come from
A residential proxy routes your request through a device that sits on a normal home internet connection. The address belongs to an internet provider and appears in the registries as consumer space, which is what makes it expensive and what makes it work.
Two things follow from that. First, the address carries the reputation of a household rather than a datacenter, so sites that block hosting ranges wholesale let it through. Second, the device is somebody else's hardware on somebody else's connection, which means it can go offline mid-request. Every serious residential setup handles reconnects, because the alternative is a scraper that stops on a dropped modem.
Providers reach these devices through a gateway. You connect to one hostname, the gateway picks an exit device that matches your targeting, and traffic leaves through it. You never connect to the household directly, which is why the gateway address never changes even though your exit address does.
Billing follows traffic rather than time, because the cost to the provider is the bandwidth bought from the device owner. That single fact drives every optimisation decision on this page: compression, blocking assets and not fetching what you will not parse.
How ours is put together
One login, one gateway, and targeting expressed as suffixes rather than separate endpoints:
Targeting through the login
login:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 rotating, new IP per request
login_c_US:password@... United States
login_c_US_city_New-York:password@... city level
login_c_US_s_42_ttl_15m:password@... hold one address 15 minutes
$1.00 per GB, no monthly minimum, 220+ countries- Rotation is the default. Leave the session suffix off and every request exits through a different address, which is what most scraping wants.
- Sticky sessions run 30 seconds, 15 minutes or one hour. The ceiling is one hour because a home device that stays reachable longer than that is the exception, not the rule.
- Traffic counts in both directions, headers included. Requesting gzip is the cheapest optimisation available and typically cuts an HTML page three to four times.
- City targeting depends on devices being online in that city at that moment. A 400 means the pool is empty right now rather than that the city is unsupported.
What residential is not
Not the same as ISP proxies
An ISP proxy is registered to a provider but hosted in a datacenter. It is static and fast and it is billed per address per month. Residential is a rotating pool of real household devices billed per gigabyte.
Not automatically undetectable
The address passes reputation checks. Your browser fingerprint, your headers and your behaviour are separate problems that a proxy does not touch.
Not unlimited because it is expensive
Every gigabyte is billed. Teams that treat residential as a flat-rate service discover the difference at the end of the month.
Not the right default
Most pages in a typical crawl never check IP reputation. Running the whole job on residential rather than the parts that need it is the most common way to overpay.
Residential against the other four address types
Most of the confusion around residential comes from comparing it to the wrong thing. Prices and country counts below are ours, taken from the machine-readable price list on 12.09.2026.
| Type | How it is billed | Countries | What the target sees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | per GB, $2.00 entry down to $1.00 | 220+ | A home subscriber on a consumer ISP. The address changes when you rotate. |
| ISP | per IP per month, $2.30 down to $1.90 | 24 | A consumer-registered address that stays yours for the whole term. |
| Datacenter IPv4 | per IP per month, $1.50 down to $1.15 | 41 | A hosting address. Fastest and cheapest, and the easiest for a target to classify. |
| IPv6 | per IP per month, $0.20 | 17 | An IPv6 address, useful only where the target answers over IPv6 at all. |
| Mobile | per modem per day, $5.76 | 26 | A carrier address behind NAT, shared with real phone subscribers. |
The row that matters for most decisions is the second one. ISP proxies are often sold as static residential, and the name is fair: the address is registered to a consumer provider. What differs is that it never rotates and you pay for the address rather than the traffic.
Questions people actually type
What are residential proxies?
Proxies that route your request through an address belonging to a home internet subscriber rather than a data centre. The target site sees an ordinary consumer connection because that is what it is. The trade is price and speed: you pay by traffic and each request travels through somebody else's home line.
What is a residential IP?
An address a consumer internet provider assigned to a household. Geolocation databases and anti-fraud systems carry that classification, which is exactly why it behaves differently from a hosting address on sites that score visitors.
Is a residential proxy the same as an ISP proxy?
No, and this is the most common mix-up. Both addresses are registered to consumer providers, but a residential address rotates and is billed per gigabyte, while an ISP address is static, stays yours for the term and is billed per address. We cover 220+ countries on residential and 24 on ISP, so availability differs too.
What does a private residential proxy mean?
Usually one of two things, and it is worth asking which. Either the address is dedicated to you for a period, which is what static ISP products give you, or the provider simply means the pool is not public. On a rotating residential pool no address is exclusively yours by design: you get a different one on the next request.
Where do providers get residential addresses?
From consumer devices whose owners agreed to share the connection, most often through software development kits bundled into free applications, or through paid schemes. The quality of that consent varies a great deal across the market. It is a fair question to ask any provider, along with whether a participant can leave, and a provider that will not answer it is telling you something.
Why are residential proxies billed per gigabyte?
Because the cost sits in the traffic, not in the address. The provider pays for every megabyte that crosses somebody else's home connection, so an address you hold but do not use costs nothing to serve. That is the opposite of datacenter and ISP products, where the address is the scarce thing and traffic is not metered.
Related terms
See this in practice
Ready to use residential proxy?
SotaProxy gives you access to rotating residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP proxies. No minimum commitment.
Get started