What is a residential proxy?

When you send a request through a residential proxy, three things happen:

• Your request goes to the proxy gateway instead of directly to the target site.
• The gateway forwards it through a real residential IP, so the target site's server logs a home-broadband address.
• The response comes back through the same path to you.

The target website has no easy way to tell the traffic apart from a genuine visitor, because the IP genuinely belongs to a residential ISP block. Anti-bot systems that block by ASN (the network operator behind an IP) can't flag it the way they flag hosting-provider ranges.

Datacenter proxies come from servers in data centers. They're fast and cheap, but their IPs belong to well-known hosting ASNs that anti-bot systems flag instantly. Residential proxies cost more per GB but pass checks that datacenter IPs fail.

Reach for residential proxies when the target actively defends against automation or personalizes by location:

• Web scraping of sites that block datacenter IPs (marketplaces, search engines, travel).
• Multi-account management where each account needs a distinct, trustworthy IP.
• Ad verification and checking geo-targeted content as a local user sees it.
• Price and market research where sites cloak data from suspicious IPs.

For high-volume jobs against tolerant targets, datacenter proxies are cheaper and fine.

Not all residential networks are equal. The things that matter:

• Real ISP-sourced IPs, not relabelled datacenter ranges.
• Transparent, per-GB pricing — beware subscription tiers that only get cheap at $1,000+/month.
• Session control: rotating (fresh IP per request) and sticky (hold one IP) via the username string.
• Geo-targeting down to country and, ideally, state/city.
• Standard protocols (HTTP/SOCKS5, user:pass auth) so it drops into your existing tools.

Roam, for reference, is flat $2/GB pay-as-you-go across 190+ countries with rotating and sticky sessions and a balance that never expires.