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.