What are Residential proxies?
Published: 2020-05-17 19:05:51

<ul>
<li><a href="#what-is-a-proxy">What is a proxy?</a></li>
<li><a href="#what-are-residential-proxies">What are residential proxies?</a></li>
<li><a href="#what-are-residential-ips">What are residential IPs?</a></li>
<li><a href="#residential-proxy-network">Why use a residential proxy network?</a></li>
<li><a href="#what-are-residential-rotating-proxies">What are residential rotating proxies?</a></li>
<li><a href="#how-do-residential-proxies-work">How do residential proxies work?</a></li>
<li><a href="#residential-proxies-benefits">What are the Benefits of Residential Proxies?</a></li>
<ul>
        <li><a href="#web-scraping">Web scraping</a></li>
        <li><a href="#accessing-ticket-sites">Accessing ticket sites</a></li>
        <li><a href="#accessing-sneaker-sites">Accessing sneaker sites</a></li>
        <li><a href="#ad-verification">Ad verification</a></li>
    </ul>
<li><a href="#residential-proxy-providers">Residential proxy Providers</a></li>
<li><a href="#conclusion">Conclusion</a></li>
</ul>

<h2 id="what-is-a-proxy">What is a proxy?</h2>
It is essential to understand what a proxy means in general before internalizing residential proxies. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines a proxy as “an intermediary server between a user’s PC and the Internet that is used to unlock websites and access information that otherwise could be blocked”. 

In simple terms, a proxy acts as a middle man between the real server and your computer, local network, or bigger scale networks. A proxy can be used for different purposes including protecting your security, accessing blocked content, or to avoid being monitored by federal or spy agencies. 

![What are residential proxies](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fhr46zeyrn053xwlvsj7.png)
<h2 id="what-are-residential-proxies">What are residential proxies?</h2>
A residential proxy works over the default IP (residential IP) address allocated to you by your Internet service provider. Every residential proxy address is mapped to a physical location. Although the internet is vast and billions of devices log into the internet, each of their locations can be traced back by referring to their IP addresses. So if you are accessing the internet without a proxy you are giving away information every time you use the internet. This could be in terms of exposing your browser preferences, cookies, and your actual IP addresses itself.

Moreover, using the internet without a residential proxy poses limitations in terms of accessing geo-locked content. So you might not be able to access some content of your preference depending on the country you are located.  Also, if your work involves using bots on social media platforms or scraping data for SEO analysis and deployment, your residential IP address can be identified and blocked leading to the inability to access desired webpages. Fortunately, with the use of residential proxy network, you can circumvent these problems.  


Fortunately, technologies such as residential proxy networks allow us to circumvent these problems.


<h2 id="what-are-residential-ips">What are residential IPs?</h2>
Before we try to know what a residential proxy is, we need to understand what a Residential IP is.
 
A residential IP address pinpoints the physical location of a device which can be your personal computer or a mobile phone. While the information about ISP, real owners, and residential IP addresses are available on the public databases, websites can examine the network, ISP, and location of users who visit them. The majority of online services consider residential IP addresses as real people and see data center IP addresses as spam.

The key benefit of residential proxy IPs is that they are physically linked to the original location and are legit. They show up as real IP addresses and so unlikely they will get banned as they are not identified as data centers. This makes residential proxies excellent for internet use. 



![Residential proxy network](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/eriri4pji2l723uabg7r.png)
<h2 id="residential-proxy-network">Why use a residential proxy network?</h2>
There are many reasons why you would want to hide your real IP address. This could be for scraping data from different websites, upload and download torrents via P2P connections, access multiple accounts from the same computer, or stream geo-blocked content. 

Whatever might be the reason, using a residential proxy network is a great way to hide your real identity online. It gives you a genuine IP address that is similar to a default residential IP address and hides your IP from servers and scraping bots online which maintain your anonymity. 

The only disadvantage is that search engines allow you to make a specific number of search requests within minutes. So using a single server setup can limit search engine access and even get you banned if you repeatedly exceed the limit. 




<h2 id="what-are-residential-rotating-proxies">What are residential rotating proxies?</h2>
Rotating residential proxies (Backconnect Proxies) are a modification of regular residential proxies. While a residential proxy hides your original IP address behind another IP address, rotating residential proxies use a bunch of proxies to conceal your identity. At regular intervals or every session, these proxies automatically take turns to emulate the real activity. This allows you to make many requests without getting identified as a spammer or get flagged for suspicious activity.  

Below is a sequence of events that happen every time you make a server request. :

- You make a search request, For example, if you search for a word or a string of words, let’s say “something”, a connection is created, let's consider this as Connection 1.
- The server processes the request and returns the result https://something.com/.  If this search is repeated at a high rate using a bot, the search engine will flag this suspicious and ban the connection.

When you connect through a residential rotating proxy or backconnect proxy, every search you make will be directed through different connections. This reduces the risk of getting blocked due to making many requests. As the residential proxy rotates your IP, you will get a new identity for every search you perform. This enables you to avoid being detected as suspicious and eventually get blocked. 



<h2 id="how-do-residential-proxies-work">How do residential proxies work?</h2>
Residential proxies work by routing internet traffic through a server that acts as an intermediary. The proxy server channels every search request you perform by identifying each of them by an alternative IPs. 

The alternative IP addresses assigned belong to real devices unlike those assigned by VPNs which are server-based addresses. So when you perform a search, it is sent to the server where information is stored using a residential proxy. This way the original IP of your device is concealed and the server only sees the residential proxy, not the real user address. So the real user cannot be identified.
A good residential proxy package depending on the service provider gives the option of targeting specific cities, countries and all requests are HTTPS encrypted for security. 

So, if you are wondering what the use cases of residential proxies are, we will discuss them in further sections. Residential IPs are the most reliable and genuine in comparison to other types of proxies. Based on browsing needs, residential proxies can be used for different purposes. Below are some of the uses of residential proxies that might interest you.


<h2 id="residential-proxies-benefits">What are the Benefits of Residential Proxies?</h2>
There are various advantages of using residential proxy services. Below are various benefits of using residential proxies that you should know of.


<h3 id="web-scraping">Web scraping</h3>
Internet area marketing is a vast of marketing that is used extensively today. This revolves around more than just posting on social media or engaging in casual ad campaigns. One of the key aspects of internet marketing is studying your competitors and learning their ways. This is a great way to access information about your competitors by performing web scraping. Web scraping is possible with residential proxies because it supports scraping of data on large scale continuously without getting identified by servers as suspicious as a residential proxy rotates IP addresses. The data center proxies are used for web scraping but on a smaller scale. If you want to perform web scraping on a large scale on Linkedin, Google, Facebook, and other giant sites, you will have to use residential proxies. 


<h3 id="accessing-ticket-sites">Accessing ticket sites</h3>
Residential proxies are immensely more efficient when used for scraping ticket sites. They give you access to comparing the ticket prices across different service providers. The conventional way of screening ticket sites using ticket proxies revolves around data center proxies. These get easily identified and are banned because of the usage of the same proxies. It is practically impossible to flag residential proxies as they act like real IP addresses by ticket sites. So you get unlimited access to ticket providers to get the volume of information you want for the post-analysis. 

    
<h3 id="accessing-sneaker-sites">Accessing sneaker sites</h3>
Shoe sites are one of the strictly monitored sites because of the concerns of design copying, identity theft, and purchase limitation. Even though this is the case, it is possible to access the information available on shoe sites on a quick and large scale using residential proxies. Compared to residential proxies, sneaker proxies seem overrated. Sneaker proxies are just a renaming for data center IP proxies. Today sneaker proxies are identified by popular sites such as EastBay, Nike, and Supreme Shoes as shoe bots. To overcome this problem, residential proxies can be used. There is a less chance for residential proxies to be blacklisted on shoe sites 


<h3 id="ad-verification">Ad verification</h3>
Residential proxies are commonly used for reputation management and verification of ads. They give you a way to check and verify ads displayed on various websites and block the ones that are suspicious and not created by you. Many competitors could try to damage the reputation of your brand in different ways. 

If you are thinking about choosing a residential proxy provider, you need to select a one that is easy to use and should support different platforms for accurate media monitoring, ad tracking, and content compliance. These are the different reasons why you need to consider having residential IPs for verification of ads. 

![Residential proxy providers](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/zwlbkga9azi73ub7f48w.png)
<h2 id="residential-proxy-providers">Residential proxy Providers</h2>
Residential proxies allow you to conceal your IP address by cloaking it with another homeowner’s IP and make it seem completely legit. This finds great use for people who want to employ aggressive data mining and get access to ticket and sneaker sites. Residential proxies are a bit more expensive compared to data server based proxies. Discover [Top 7 residential proxy providers](https://dev.to/princepeterhansen/top-7-residential-proxies-providers-31f9)

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<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
If you are looking to anonymously access the internet by hiding your IP regular proxy networks are great for you. But if you are searching for a way to not get banned and your work involves making a series of intense search requests and data scraping, you will find residential proxies useful. 

The residential IP proxy addresses are tagged with the real location of other users. This makes you less prone to getting banned by avoiding overload on the servers as IP addresses are rotated. So residential proxies are perfect for harvesting and scraping research data from websites of your choice including sneaker and ticket websites that recognize and prohibit proxy data centers.