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What Is a Residential Proxy?

A residential proxy sends your requests out through an IP address that a consumer internet provider assigned to a home connection. Websites see an ordinary household visitor on a broadband network instead of a server in a data centre.

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Best fit for Residential proxyRotating Residential Proxiesfrom$0.63/GB
how it works

How residential proxies work

Residential IPs belong to real home connections, whose owners have agreed to share spare bandwidth, usually through an app or SDK. A provider joins millions of these devices into one pool, and you reach the pool through a single gateway host and port, a design called a backconnect proxy.

You never connect to a home device directly. Your client sends each request to the gateway with a username and password, and the gateway picks an exit IP that matches the options in your credentials: country, state, city or ASN, and whether to rotate on every request or keep one IP for a sticky session. Because the device behind an IP can go offline at any time, residential exits are not permanent, and good client code retries on a fresh IP when a connection drops.

  • Residential

    This term
    Where the IP comes from
    Home broadband connections
    IP stays the same
    No; rotates or sticks for a set time
    Usually billed
    Per GB

  • ISP (static residential)

    Where the IP comes from
    Consumer ISP ranges hosted on servers
    IP stays the same
    Yes, for as long as you hold it
    Usually billed
    Per IP

  • Datacenter

    Where the IP comes from
    Hosting and cloud providers
    IP stays the same
    Yes
    Usually billed
    Per IP

  • Mobile

    Where the IP comes from
    4G/5G carrier networks
    IP stays the same
    No; rotates or sticks for a set time
    Usually billed
    Per GB
why it matters

Why residential proxies matter for proxy users

The value of a residential IP is its network. A lookup shows a consumer ISP, not a hosting company, so sites serve the same pages, prices and search results that local households see. The size of the pool matters as much: spreading requests across many IPs keeps the load on each one low.

Residential proxies suit jobs that need breadth and location rather than one fixed identity: collecting public data from many pages, checking localised prices, tracking search rankings city by city and verifying that ads display correctly in each market. When you need the same IP every day, a static ISP proxy is the better fit.

CleanProxies rotating residential proxies draw on a pool of 50M+ IPs in 190+ countries with country, state, city or ASN targeting, as low as $0.63 per GB, and the data you buy never expires.

Residential proxy: what it means for you
  • Pay per GB, so block images, video and fonts you don't need.
  • Use per-request rotation for independent page loads and sticky sessions for multi-step flows.
  • Target the narrowest location you actually need; very small cities have fewer available IPs.

Rotating residential proxies from $0.63/GB

The CleanProxies proxy that fits best here, with a $4.99 trial to test it first.

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Guides from the blog

Setup guides and best practices from the CleanProxies blog.

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Related terms

Terms that come up alongside Residential proxy.

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Residential proxy FAQs

Straight answers about Residential proxy.

A VPN routes all of a device's traffic through one server, usually in a data centre. A residential proxy routes individual requests through home IPs from a large pool, and you choose the location and rotation per request or per session.

Got more questions?All FAQs