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What is a residential proxy?

A residential proxy is a type of proxy server. Proxy servers act as an intermediary for all the traffic between your devices and the websites you connect to. Using a proxy server means all your internet traffic looks like its coming from the proxy servers location, improving online anonymity, and allowing access to geo-blocked content such as YouTube videos not available in your country.

Normally, proxy server providers route your traffic through a data center. Residential proxies instead route your traffic through computers or phones connected to typical home ISPs. This makes residential proxies even more anonymous, better hiding the fact youre using a proxy and minimizing the chance your connection will be blocked.

Residential proxies cost significantly more than data center proxies on a per-month, per-GB basis, but typically offer better results because the proxy connection is better masked.

As an example, the Wise datacenter proxy plan from Smartproxy (opens in new tab) costs $200/month for 400GB. In comparison, the Starter residential proxy plan, also $200/month, only includes 20GB.

You can choose the more economical Micro residential proxy plan, which is $75/month for 5GB of data. For many business applications, this amount of monthly data will be more than enough.

Residential proxies can be used by individuals and businesses for any application where they want traffic to appear as if its coming from another location. Residential proxies are used heavily in digital advertising, affiliate testing, market price monitoring, web scraping, and social media automation.

The use of residential proxies is entirely legal. Of course, you shouldnt use a residential proxy to perform any illegal activity.

For example, residential proxies are often used to make web scraping harder for websites to block. Its legal to use a residential proxy to scrape websites that are publicly available, but illegal to scrape content from private websites.

A proxy will route all your internet traffic through an intermediary device. A VPN service performs a similar role but also encrypts all the data being transferred. This is more secure but has more overhead.

Residential proxies are the best choice for those looking to perform hundreds or thousands of requests, as theyre typically cheaper and faster than VPNs at scale. VPNs are a better choice for personal use, protecting yourself from hackers, and preventing ISP tracking.

You can read more about the differences in our guide on proxies vs VPNs (opens in new tab).

A rotating residential proxy gives you a new IP address from a pool each time you make a new connection. If you run a script to scrape content from a thousand pages of web content, for example, those connections will be sent from up to a thousand different connections. This type of proxy is difficult to track and block.

With a good residential proxy service, you can set how long your IP address will remain constant before being assigned a new one. Typically, theres a maximum of around 30 minutes. Rotating residential proxies change the IP address for every request you make.

So you can better understand the roles of virtual private networks and proxies, weve put together a guide on the difference between a VPN and a proxy (opens in new tab). You can read about how VPNs keep your data safe (opens in new tab) through the use of encrypted tunnels, and our pick of the best free and paid proxies (opens in new tab) available today.

TechRadar created this content as part of a paid partnership with SmartProxy. The contents of this article are entirely independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of TechRadar.

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What is a residential proxy? Here's everything you need to know - TechRadar