Residential proxy
A residential proxy is an IP address allocated by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to a real residential household or mobile device. When you route a web scraping request through a residential proxy, the target website sees a request originating from what looks like a genuine home internet connection — not a datacenter IP.
This distinction matters because most modern anti-bot detection systems (Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai, PerimeterX) flag and block datacenter IPs as high-risk. A datacenter IP from AWS eu-west-1 is an obvious scraping signal. A residential IP from a broadband subscriber in Manchester is not.
Why it matters for scraping
The practical consequence: on the same target site, a datacenter proxy might achieve 30–50% success; a residential proxy from the same vendor might achieve 70–95% success. The difference is the IP reputation — residential IPs haven’t been pre-flagged by bot-detection databases.
Bright Data’s residential network has 72 million residential IPs across 195 countries as of 2026. Zyte’s residential pool is smaller but optimised for e-commerce targets. ScraperAPI bundles residential proxies in their premium tier (10 credits per request for premium proxy access).
Example: specifying residential proxy with ScraperAPI
# Default request (datacenter proxy, 1 credit)
curl "https://api.scraperapi.com/?api_key=KEY&url=TARGET_URL"
# Premium residential proxy (10 credits — for protected targets)
curl "https://api.scraperapi.com/?api_key=KEY&url=TARGET_URL&premium=true"The premium=true flag routes through residential IPs. The cost per request goes from 1 credit to 10 credits — why the credit multiplier matters on protected targets.
Types of residential proxies
- Rotating residential: IP changes with each request (or each session). Best for large-scale scraping where IP diversity matters.
- Sticky residential (session proxy): Same IP held for a session duration (e.g., 10 minutes). Required for multi-step workflows like login → navigate → extract.
- Mobile residential: IPs assigned by mobile carriers. Higher trust score than home broadband on some anti-bot systems (particularly for app-like targets).
- ISP proxy (static residential): Fixed IP that appears as residential but is hosted in a datacenter. Higher bandwidth and lower latency than true residential at some cost to authenticity.
Pricing reality
Residential proxies are billed per gigabyte of traffic transferred. Bright Data’s residential rate is $8.40/GB as of 2026. At approximately 300KB per average product page, that’s $2.52 per 1,000 pages in raw proxy cost — before compute, storage, or parsing overhead.
For reference: a page that loads many images or scripts may transfer 2–5MB. JavaScript-heavy SPAs often transfer significantly more data per session than static pages.
Related concepts
- Rotating proxy — how IP rotation works across a request pool
- Anti-bot detection — what residential proxies are designed to bypass
- Datacenter proxy — the cheaper, lower-trust alternative