Residential proxies

Residential proxies are proxies on addresses that an internet provider issued to ordinary home subscribers. To a site, such an address looks like an apartment in a city, not a rack in a data centre.

What sets them apart isn't speed or reliability — on those they're usually worse than datacentre proxies. What sets them apart is origin: the address belongs to a home provider, and that's exactly how it's listed in the databases.

What it's for

Every IP address has a reputation, and protection systems look at it before they look at your browser. Hosting ranges are well known: servers, scrapers and bots come from them, so they're treated with suspicion by default — regardless of who actually showed up.

The measurement that settled everything

We spent a week catching an endless captcha loop on Cloudflare protection: the check would pass and then start over, round and round. We went through everything we suspected — fingerprint consistency, proxy type, HTTP versus SOCKS, spoofing details. None of it helped.

Switching the proxy to residential helped. The cause was the datacentre address's reputation, and only that.

Which gives a conclusion worth remembering before any settings:

If a captcha loops — change the address first, not the settings. No antidetect tool fixes an IP's reputation, because it's checked before your browser has had a chance to show anything.

When you don't need them

Residential proxies cost noticeably more and are usually billed by traffic. Paying for them makes sense where serious protection is in place. And if the task is just keeping several of your own accounts open side by side without getting logged out, you may not need a proxy at all: profiles are isolated even without one.

Mobile — a separate kind

Mobile proxies use cell-carrier addresses. Trust in them is even higher: thousands of real people sit behind a single carrier address, so suspecting it isn't worthwhile. They cost more than residential.