What Are Residential Proxies And Why Do You Need Them?
A proxy is crucial for a better data collection. Learn how Rotating Residential Proxies can help you maintain your competitive advantage
24-Oct-2019
Residential proxies allow you to choose a specific location (country, city, or a mobile carrier) and surf the web as a real-user in that area. Proxies can be defined as intermediaries that protect users from general web traffic. They act as buffers while also concealing your IP address. Proxies are alternative IP addresses assigned to users by the provider.
All the user’s search requests are channeled via the proxy IP to the proxy server then to the resource server. This way, the user’s activity is concealed and identity remains anonymous.
How residential proxies work
Residential proxies essentially route your internet traffic through an intermediary server. The proxy server assigns you an alternative IP through which all of your server requests are channeled.
Note that the alternative IP address assigned, belongs to a real device. When you make a search request, it is conveyed to the resource server via your residential proxy. This way, your real IP is concealed, and sites perceive your activity as that of any other regular user.
Depending on the provider, an ideal residential proxy package affords the option of targeting countries, cities and all requests should be HTTPS encrypted for security.
So, what are some uses of residential proxies?
Residential IPs are genuine and more trustworthy compared to other types of proxies. Depending on your browsing needs, one can use residential proxies for different purposes. Here are some uses of residential proxies you may want to consider.
Ad verification
This is a very common use of residential proxies as they provide the means of checking and verifying ads displayed on your pages allowing you to recognize and block suspicious ads. Without adequate AD verification, your competitors may use devious means to damage your brand reputation.
It is advisable to choose a residential proxy provider that is very easy to use. The right platform should enable you to choose residential or mobile IPs for accurate ad tracking, media monitoring, and content compliance. All these are reasons to consider residential IPs for your ad verification.
Web scraping
Internet marketing goes far beyond casual ads and social media posts. You’ve got to study your competitors and learn their ways. The best way to access your competitor’s info is by web scraping. Web scraping with residential proxies is possible because they support mass scraping by allowing you to continuously rotate the IPs. It is important to note that data center proxies can also be used for web scraping. Are you confused about data center IP proxy? Learn from this post. However, they are best suited for use on a much smaller scale. If you want to do large scale scraping on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other giant sites, residential proxies are the best.
Market price monitoring
To keep your client’s coming, it is necessary to monitor and comply with the market pricing trends. You don’t want to overprice your products and scare away potential clients or underprice and get customers doubting the quality. With residential proxies, you will be able to leverage sales intelligence tools to give you timely market price updates.
The data gathered by your sales intelligence software should be analyzed appropriately. If not done appropriately, you are likely to end up with the wrong pricing info, which can be very damaging to your business sales efforts. Overall, residential proxies make it possible for you to use different sales intelligence software. With that info, it is possible to do price monitoring, comparison, and analysis to come up with an acceptable price for your products.
Accessing sneaker sites
Shoe sites are often tightly monitored. This is because of identity theft, design copying and purchase limitations that are rife in the industry. Even so, it is still possible to access all the information you may require from these sites. Residential proxies provide ad verification in an excellent way to access sneaker sites. Sneaker proxies are overrated.
In truth, sneaker proxies can be data center IP proxies. However, with your shoe bots, sneaker proxies are still blocked by sites like Nike, EastBay, and Supreme Shoes. The way to get around this problem is by using residential proxies. They are trusted and less prone to blacklisting by popular shoe sites.
Accessing ticket sites
When it comes to scraping ticket sites, there’s no better way than using residential proxies. They will grant the access you need to easily compare ticket prices across different providers.
Many different ticket proxies are available, the problem with these is that they are mostly data center proxies. Data center IPs are easy to identify and tickets sites easily notice and ban users of these IPs. Most sites trust residential proxies, ticket sites included. Use them to access all the info you want from different ticket providers.
Internet marketing
This is a comprehensive platform. Site owners are always looking for ways to get ahead of their competitors. In such competitive settings, the best way to survive is by studying the ways of your competitors. Harness the power and potential of residential proxies to maximize your marketing potential. Make use of ads automation, social media campaigns, and email automation to improve your market reach.
SEO content complianceResidential proxies support different SEO tools. The platform supports a whole lot of tools besides Scrapebox and Xrumer. Appropriate onsite SEO improves your site’s traffic and leads. By scraping competitor sites, you get info about their keywords and sources of traffic.
You can also tweak your site contents to support multiple languages. Link building to and from an authority site is also crucial. With the right tools, the residential proxy platform allows you to create meaningful links for your website to flourish. You also get to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of previous links. There are different audit and crawling tools you can use for such tasks allowing you to optimize your site to improve its performance.
Social media management
There’s no second-guessing the power of social media in modern web marketing. With residential proxies, it is now possible to create multiple social media accounts and manage them seamlessly.
What to consider before buying Residential Proxies
BudgetResidential proxies are often very expensive. Nevertheless, you can always find a better deal. All you need to do is compare prices between providers.
Purpose and use
Why do you need residential proxies? This is a very pertinent question. It is for basic security and small scale scraping, then think again. Maybe you don’t need residential proxies. Datacenter proxies might as well be what you need. On the other hand, if you want a proxy package for large scale scraping, anonymity, and security, then you need residential proxies.
Always strive to know why you need residential proxies. It is not prudent to spend so much while maybe you could do just fine with a cheap shared proxy package. This also applies when buying different residential proxy packages.
Compatibility with automation tools
Such as for SEO, if you are into this for site optimization, then you better check and confirm that the residential proxy package supports SEO tools. Be sure to verify that prior to purchasing
Site unlockingResidential proxies make it possible to stream content from geo-restricted sites without ever being blocked or flagged. Some providers may have blocked IPs, check and verify the package before making a payment.
That is it for this round-up of residential proxies. This post is meant to help you understand residential proxies and why you need them.
John McHenry | Founder of, Data analyst and Web developer
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Residential Proxies: A Complete Guide to Using Them …
Article content
What are residential proxies?
Residential vs. datacenter proxies
How to use residential proxies?
Residential proxies use cases
Rotating residential proxies
Static residential proxies
A few words about free residential proxies
How to get residential proxies?
How to make residential proxies?
Residential proxies are one of the most widely-used services nowadays as businesses and simple users want to avoid restrictions and automate some tasks. But despite the popularity, this tool is still entwined with the haze of mystery. What are residential proxies, and how do they differ from other kinds of proxies? Why are they so special and do you need them at all? This article will answer all your questions about residential proxies and provide you with all the details you need to are residential proxies? Residential proxies are IP addresses that were issued by a real internet service provider for an existing device. In other words, they are remote gadgets to which you can connect to reroute your traffic and mask your real IP sidential vs. datacenter proxiesThese two services might seem quite similar — both kinds of proxies allow you to mask your IP and avoid restrictions based on a location. But the difference between them is rather center proxies are shared servers you can connect to. Besides you, there will be many other users that also connect to a datacenter proxy server to mask their data — it means, you will share the IP address with others. It can be an issue for certain tasks such as web scraping. So even though datacenter proxies are rather fast and cheap, they are not as agile and reliable as residential you need a perfect cover-up, you should stick to residential proxies. Using them, you will appear to a destination server as a resident of a country of your choice. And considering that the IP address is real and belongs to an existing device, it’s unlikely that a destination server will suspect that you’re using is another, more specific kind of residential type — mobile proxies. These are IPs that only belong to mobile devices. Such a service can be useful for specific marketing needs, testing, and oosing between residential and data center proxies for buying sneakersGenerally, residential proxies will be the better choice. To quote from our article that goes into greater detail about using proxies to buy sneakers:There is one more case of using proxies to buy sneakers online: geo-restrictions. Most brands would allow only so many countries to access the limited collection. And you want to be located in that country. Using a [residential] proxy, you can appear to be in the needed location without physically moving to use residential proxies? Usually, picking residential proxies you will gain access to a pool — a certain number of IP addresses from the locations of your choice. The size of the pool depends on your needs and on the pricing plan you you have proxies, you can connect them manually, using a proxy management tool, or via a scraper if you’re getting this service for data gathering. Simply choose the location you need and enjoy online sidential proxies use casesThere are many use cases for residential proxies, but we will cover the most popular ones so that you can gain an understanding of how exactly this service can be gatheringResidential proxies are very often used for gathering data from the internet. Data scientists use a special tool called scraper to acquire the information. It is a robot that goes through pages and obtains the data it was told to gather.? Further reading: 4 skills that will make you a better data scientistSince most website owners protect their resources from data gathering for numerous reasons, specialists need to cover up their activity to remain unnoticed and acquire the information successfully. Residential proxies are great for this job — applying a new IP address for each request, specialists can hide their scraping activity and avoid restrictions. ❓ Further reading: What is the difference between scraping and crawling? Data gathering became one of the cornerstones of a successful business. So it will be fair to say that residential proxies will be useful for any company that wants to scrape data from the internet and leverage it to reach desired goals. Web scraping is a useful tool for all markets you can imagine — business intelligence is a priceless rketing research and content managementA good marketing strategy is based on quality data. Marketing specialists can use proxies to check the activity of competitors — what ads and content they offer to target audiences in different locations, for example. Also, using residential proxies, marketing managers can verify their own ads to make sure they’re displayed correctly and are reaching the required ntent is a part of marketing strategy, so with proxies, marketing specialists can see what kinds of blog posts or some other content their competitors offer to target audiences from different countries. It can be a valuable source of insights and inspiration as it’s easy to see what’s working for someone and pick up their aggregatorsAs price aggregators follow a challenging goal — to deliver their users true and quality information about prices — they need to gather data every day. Residential proxies allow price aggregators to access all the websites and pages they need. That’s a huge deal considering that most e-commerce stores protect their pages from data gathering. But proxies are the perfect way to bypass this Engine OptimizationSEO specialists utilize proxies to control the ranks of websites from different locations and verify targeted ads. Viewing the internet through the eyes of a user from a certain country, they can ensure things are going just as planned. Also, with the help of residential proxies SEO specialists can see what their competitors are doing and, perhaps, get useful ademic researchIt’s crucial for those performing academic research to have access to all the information they need for their project. Moreover, they need to be sure this data is not false. Residential proxies will lift all the limits you might encounter online. Also, they can let researchers check if the information looks the same for users from different locations to verify it. TestingDevelopers use residential proxies to test their services and make sure they’re working properly for all users regardless of their location. Also, proxies are great for testing the server for its protection and ability to handle the traffic. With different IPs, it’s easy for developers to create realistic attacks and traffic protectionThe opportunity to browse the internet through the eyes of users from different countries allows brands to quickly detect malefactors. Residential proxies are great for finding infringement cases and gathering proof for the violation of intellectual property rights, enhancing your brand protection tating residential proxiesProxy rotation is the feature that changes IP addresses accordingly to set criteria. You can set this function to rotate proxies every couple of minutes or to assign a new IP to each request — the last option is useful for web scraping. Rotating proxies simplify many service is usually offered by a proxy provider. But you can also use special proxy management tools that will rotate IPs for residential proxiesUsing static proxies, you will remain connected to the same IP until you choose to disconnect from it or switch to another server. This approach is older than rotating residential proxies, yet it’s useful in some cases. For example, for social media management, you need to remain connected to the same IP address for as long as you’re logged into the same account. A few words about free residential proxiesYou can get free residential proxies, but we strongly recommend you to avoid them. Free proxy providers don’t verify their users. Therefore, you never know how clean and reliable these proxies are. Quite likely, most of them will be already blocked by many websites and maybe even blacklisted as proxy servers. Then you will have a hard time trying to find the working IP address. It will slow down the processes significantly if not get them jammed at to get residential proxies? Simply use a paid provider that offers high-quality residential proxies. Infatica checks every customer to make sure it’s not using proxies to violate someone’s rights or perform any illegal activity. Therefore, the whole one million of our residential proxies is clean and available for your use. We offer flexible pricing plans, so it will be easy for you to choose the suitable one. Yet, if you struggle with your decision, drop us a line so that we help you to make residential proxies? Since each residential proxy is a real device, you need to gain access to it to reroute your traffic through it. Obviously, you need the owner of this gadget to know about your activity, otherwise, you’re violating the rights of this fatica sources residential IPs through the SDK — a network of apps. Developers join our SDK to monetize their software, and they offer their users to become a part of Infatica’s proxy network. In exchange for that, users get valuable benefits such as ad-free apps or specific premium features. Every user can join and quit the Infatica network at any moment. We keep our rules and activity clear to make sure everyone is satisfied. Also, we reroute our customers’ traffic through sourced devices only when they’re not used by their sidential proxies are a useful and valuable tool for businesses and individual users. Depending on your needs, you can choose different pools of IPs, rotating or static proxies. The only thing you should avoid is free residential proxies — they will not do you any good. If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to contact us. Our support team is always ready to provide you with all the information you need.
How Residential Proxies Enable Fraud | IPQualityScore.com
Residential proxies are becoming more popular with fraudsters and cybercriminals, allowing these users to easily engage in abusive behavior and bypass fraud filters.
Internet fraud is a perpetual thorn in the side of businesses, advertisers, consumers, and even payment processors. Businesses often bear the financial brunt of this behavior in the form of chargebacks, ad fraud, free trial abuse, and similar fraudulent actions. Most companies today have some sort of fraud prevention, however residential proxies frequently bypass these measures and allow bad actors to operate unchecked. Solutions that can tackle evolving threats, such as IP reputation checks which can detect botnets and residential proxies are in high demand.
Let’s discuss credit card chargebacks, a frequent nuisance for businesses that cause billions of dollars in losses per year. It’s typical for a eCommerce fraud prevention solution to focus solely on chargeback prevention. The idea is simple: A fraudster uses a stolen credit card—often purchased in bulk online—and eventually the card’s true owner will notice the suspicious charge and file a dispute with their credit card company or bank. Chargebacks are typically filed about 30-60 days after the initial charge, leaving the business in the red after having shipped or delivered the initial service.
So how are cybercriminals so successful at credit card fraud? Fraudsters know how to work the system. They hide and sneak around the Internet, masking their true identity by using proxies. Proxies are neither good nor evil; instead, they are one of the ways to remain anonymous or access information that would otherwise be unavailable. The intent of the user is what matters. For the purpose of this article, we’re going to focus on the bad user, as IPQS’ services are smart enough to detect user intent and differentiate between good and bad users.
When cybercriminals use proxies, the bad user—the fraudster—is using a data center or residential proxy connection. Both types of proxies enable fraud; however, residential proxies are more dangerous due to a stealthier footprint. To begin, let’s examine the differences between the two types.
To understand why residential proxies are worse at enabling fraud it’s important to distinguish how they’re different from data center or hosting service proxies.
Data Center Proxy: Uses the IP address of a server issued by a hosting company and are easily identifiable.
Residential Proxy: Uses residential IP addresses issued by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), often without the knowledge of the IP addresses’ real owner. These connections are often generated by the user’s device being infected with malware and connected to a botnet.
Let’s talk about hosting and data center proxies. Without a proxy, you access a website from your computer. With a data center proxy, you access a website from the data center server. The datacenter proxy acts as an intermediary which protects your identity. The website sees the IP address of the data center instead of your own. Most bot detection solutions only focus on preventing data center IP addresses.
A residential proxy, on the other hand, uses an IP address that belongs to another residence. The other residence is the intermediary in this scenario. Unlike data center IP addresses, residential IP addresses are seen as more legitimate to websites and usually do not raise any red flags. It’s a matter of trust. An IP address is less likely to get flagged or banned if it’s coming from a home connection. That’s why residential proxies are more dangerous.
Let’s walk through an example of how residential proxies enable fraud. Viktor Petrov is fictitious; however, this story is meant to illustrate the steps a bad actor takes to commit fraud.
Viktor lives in Belarus but he doesn’t want Gamestore, Amazon, or PayPal to know that; instead, he claims to live in Chicago, IL. After all, he purchased a residential proxy. The home where the IP address is assigned to is located in Chicago. He could have chosen a data center proxy, but Viktor didn’t want to take a chance the data center server would be banned. He also doesn’t want his IP address to appear suspicious.
Viktor already has access to:
Credit card numbers
Card owner addresses
CVV security codes
Email addresses
His modus operandi is simple, yet effective: sell what he doesn’t have and still make money. Let’s dig a little deeper to examine the process.
Viktor successfully sells an Xbox One on Amazon for $200; however, he doesn’t own one. Steve, the buyer, is expecting the new gaming console to be delivered within a few days. Viktor uses April’s credit card to buy an Xbox One from Gamestore. He wants it to be shipped to Steve’s home and after a few days, it arrives. There’s only one problem, however: April notices a charge for $200 in her credit card account. She never shopped at Gamestore! She didn’t even know that her credit card information was stolen and sold on the dark web a few months prior.
What happens next? April will call her credit card company and dispute the charge. Shortly thereafter, she’ll be refunded; however, the credit card company will demand Gamestore pay them in the form of a chargeback.
We are here to mitigate this type of fraud and subsequent chargeback against your business.
Chargebacks are just one of the major issues caused by residential proxies. Since these IP addresses are so difficult to recognize as compromised or being controlled by another user, most websites will not ban or limit residential connections. Therefore, these IP addresses are the premier choice for bad actors to use for creating duplicate accounts, bypassing geographic filters, taking advantage of free trials, engaging in ad or click fraud, submitting fake data through lead generation funnels, and practically any type of abuse you can think of.
Because residential proxies use residential IP addresses, they are difficult to detect and have a very small online footprint; however, IPQS’ Proxy Detection service performs multiple tests to determine if an IP address is acting as a residential proxy or is active within a botnet. Using our service, it is possible to block residential proxies in real-time, minimizing the chance your business will be a victim of fraud or chargebacks.
Deploy our tools on your site in just minutes, and say goodbye to fraud! Start now with a free trial.
Frequently Asked Questions about what is a residential proxy
What are residential proxies used for?
Residential proxies are IP addresses that were issued by a real internet service provider for an existing device. In other words, they are remote gadgets to which you can connect to reroute your traffic and mask your real IP address.May 13, 2020
Can residential proxies be detected?
Residential Proxy Detection Because residential proxies use residential IP addresses, they are difficult to detect and have a very small online footprint; however, IPQS’ Proxy Detection service performs multiple tests to determine if an IP address is acting as a residential proxy or is active within a botnet.
How long do residential proxies last?
How long do residential proxies last? It depends on the session – one IP can last for up to 1, 10, or 30 minutes during a sticky session. However, if you’re choosing a rotating session, the IPs will change with every request.Jun 7, 2021