What Are Residential Proxies and Why Use Them?
Tags: beginners, residential, proxies, oxylabs
Published: 2022-07-04 14:20:45

Are you trying to find the best proxies for your web scraping needs? Or want to understand the distinguishing features of each type better?

At Oxylabs, we created a video covering **everything you need to know about** [residential proxies](https://oxy.yt/go0R). Watch it now or read the blog post below for a short and clear explanation!

{% youtube W_qhsgXkjng %}

**Defining residential proxies**

Putting it simply, residential proxies are real IP addresses provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). By giving you access to physical locations across the globe, these proxies mimic organic user behavior to keep you away from geo restrictions, scale your data gathering, and ensure you stay anonymous online.

What are the use cases of residential proxies?
As mentioned in the video, residential proxies cover a variety of use cases, such as:

- 
Ad verification

- 
Load testing 

- 
Review monitoring

- 
Travel fare aggregation

- 
And more…

**Why choose residential proxies?**

There are multiple benefits of using residential proxies for your web scraping processes. And if we talk specifically about Oxylabs’ Residential Proxies, here are a few of the prominent advantages: 

- 
Country, city, and state-level targeting which allows you to leave geo-location blocks a thing of the past.

- 
Partnership with [Honeygain](https://www.honeygain.com), a crowdsourced web intelligence network, who became our major residential proxy provider. This contract ensures that a majority of Oxylabs’ Residential Proxies meet the Tier A+ proxy criteria which encompasess absolute transparency and financial rewards for their network participants. 

- 
Unlimited concurrent sessions, allowing you to scale your business projects whenever you want.

- 
Nifty dashboard through which you can easily choose your preferred residential proxy plans and start scraping right away.

**Residential proxies in action**

The easiest way to start using residential proxies is through a single backconnect entry which you can do via your terminal.

To make the first request, simply add your proxy username and password, and click enter. You can also specify country and city by adding cc to the authorization header together with a country code and the city’s name (DE for Germany, GB for the United Kingdom, etc.). This approach can also support session control by adding a Sessid parameter with session ID string.

**For a visual example on how to do all that, check out our short video!**

In addition, as explained in the video, while using Oxylabs’ Residential Proxies, you can follow your traffic usage statistics in our dashboard. This means you’ll always know how much scraping progress you’re doing!

Some other important benefits our users get include:

- 
Several third-party integration choices

- 
Proxy Manager to use with Oxylabs’ proxies as well as any proxy provider

- 
Dedicated Account Manager that helps with day-to-day web scraping tasks

**To sum up**

Residential proxies are the ultimate solution for those looking to mask their identity while surfing and scraping the web. In this YouTube video, we took the example of our Oxylabs Residential Proxies and briefly covered their main use cases, advantages, and features so that you clearly understand what they are and how they work.