Web Scraping & Crawling
What is a residential proxy?
A proxy that routes your traffic through an IP address assigned by a consumer ISP, making your requests look like ordinary home users.
Residential proxies forward requests through real residential connections (typically devices in a peer-to-peer pool, with consent) so the destination server sees a Comcast, Verizon, or Deutsche Telekom IP instead of an AWS or Hetzner one. To anti-bot systems that block by ASN, that distinction is the entire game.
The trade-offs are price, speed, and ethics. Residential proxies cost 10-50x more per GB than datacenter proxies, are slower because they run over consumer broadband, and depend on a supply pool whose consent quality varies by provider. Reputable vendors (Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy) document opt-in flows; many resellers do not.
For ethical and legal use, prefer providers with explicit consent and audit trails, target only public data, and respect robots.txt. The line between legitimate residential proxy use and "botnet-as-a-service" can be thin if you are not paying attention to your supplier.
How Brand.dev uses residential proxy
Endpoints in the Brand.dev API where this concept comes up directly.
FAQ
When should I use residential vs datacenter proxies?
Use datacenter for sites that don't actively block, since they're 10-50x cheaper and faster. Escalate to residential only when you start seeing 403s or CAPTCHAs from datacenter ranges.
Are residential proxies legal?
In most jurisdictions, yes, provided the proxy users opted in and you only access public data. Using them to bypass authentication or terms-of-service prohibitions is a separate question.
What's a mobile proxy?
The same idea but routed through cellular carrier IPs. They're harder to block (carriers NAT thousands of users behind shared IPs) but cost even more.
Related terms
A server that forwards your network requests, presenting its own IP address to the destination instead of yours.
Programmatically extracting structured data from websites that were designed to be read by humans.
A challenge-response test designed to distinguish humans from bots, usually presented as image, audio, or behavioral puzzles.
A server-side policy that caps how many requests a client can make in a given window, returning 429 Too Many Requests when the cap is exceeded.