What Are Residential Proxies & Why Use Them for Scraping?

As more of our lives are being lived online, the need for tools to manage what information we spread and to protect our anonymity while browsing is becoming increasingly important. Proxies have been with us for some time and are commonly used tools to keep web scrapers and users’ browsing activities private.

While there is a wide class of different proxy tools, residential proxies are some of the most powerful. This type of proxy can deliver higher levels of reliability and security for web scrapers looking to extract data from difficult to scrape sites.

However, not everyone is familiar with this type of proxy and its many benefits. In this FAQ, we’ll explain what a residential proxy is and answer some of the most important questions about using this technology.

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What Is a Residential Proxy?

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To understand exactly what a residential proxy is, you first need to grasp what a residential IP is. An IP address is a unique identifier assigned to an individual device when it connects to a network. This allows devices or endpoints to communicate with each other directly and without crossing wires.A residential IP refers to the IP assigned to a specific device, such as a computer, mobile phone, tablet, etc. This IP is associated with information about the device, its owner ISP, and its approximate physical location.

Internet Services Providers (ISPs) own residential IP addresses and store them in public databases. They assign an IP to each device that connects to their network. Residential IPs are associated with a single device and, by extension, its user.

As residential IP addresses are associated with individuals, they are treated as real people by online services. In contrast, database proxies are usually linked with spam and may be blocked on the spot.

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Why Should I Use A Residential Proxy?

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There are many possible reasons to use any type of proxy, however, residential proxies are especially useful in certain circumstances:

The main benefits of using a proxy is that they are harder to detect for anti-scraping solutions and residential proxy providers generally have better city and state level geographic coverage that datacenter proxies allow, making them ideal when you need to make your requests look like they are coming from a specific city or state. However, there are also more specific cases in which a proxy can be useful.

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How Can I Use Residential Proxies?

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Getting started with a proxy and setting it up on your device is usually a relatively straightforward process. The steps may vary slightly depending on the proxy provider you choose, however, in most cases they will provide you with a proxy port or an API endpoint that you can send your HTTP requests too and they will then route your requests to the appropriate residential proxy in their proxy pools.

Sometimes, they will provide you with individual residential IP addresses for you to use, but this isn’t standard practice and isn’t used by the bigger residential proxy providers.