Residential proxy

Every IP address belongs to an autonomous system, and that system is registered to an organisation. An address registered to Comcast, Orange or Vodafone reads as somebody’s home connection. An address registered to a hosting provider reads as a server. That registration is public, instantly checkable, and it is the whole difference between a residential proxy and a datacenter one.

How an address gets classified

Classification is a lookup, not an inference. Each range is registered with a regional internet registry — ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC or AFRINIC — and the WHOIS record names the organisation holding it. Commercial databases such as MaxMind and IP2Location take that registration and add a usage type per range: ISP, hosting, mobile, business, education. A platform ships that database locally, so scoring the network origin of a request costs microseconds and can run on every single one.

Reverse DNS is the secondary tell. Consumer lines usually carry a PTR record following an ISP naming convention — strings like dsl, dyn, cable, pool or cust, often with the address itself encoded into the hostname. Hosting ranges tend to carry a generic PTR or none at all. Neither is decisive alone, but a residential-classified address with no PTR and a hosting-shaped latency profile is worth a second look before you buy the pool.

Where the addresses come from

Providers build residential pools by getting consumer devices to relay traffic — usually through SDKs bundled into free apps or VPNs, where the user consents in the terms. This is why residential pools are large but variable: an address is only usable while the underlying device is online. A headline figure like "150 million IPs" describes unique addresses observed over the pool’s lifetime, not addresses available right now, and the two numbers differ by orders of magnitude. The figure that matters to you is how many distinct exits you can actually obtain in your target country within an hour.

What it costs and where the gigabytes go

Residential proxies are usually billed per gigabyte rather than per IP, typically from around $2/GB and climbing toward $8/GB in smaller volumes. Everything crossing the tunnel is metered — TLS handshakes, retries, image assets, app updates and operating-system background traffic. An Android device doing nothing at all still burns roughly 50 to 150 MB a day on Play Services, sync and update checks. A short-video feed at 720p runs roughly 1 to 3 MB per clip, so an hour of scrolling comfortably reaches 0.5 to 1.5 GB.

That arithmetic decides the category. Twenty devices idling costs a couple of gigabytes a day and per-GB billing is cheap. Twenty devices warming video feeds for two hours each is closer to 40 GB a day, at which point a fixed-price ISP proxy or mobile proxy is cheaper despite the higher headline rate. Work out the crossover before committing to a plan, not after the first invoice.

Checking a residential proxy yourself

• Send a request through it to an IP information endpoint over SOCKS5 — curl -x socks5h://user:pass@host:port https://ipinfo.io/json — and read the org and asn fields. The org must name a consumer internet provider, not a hosting company.
• Repeat the call ten times and compare the first three octets. Ten addresses inside a single /24 is one small block being sold as a large pool.
• Run a reverse lookup with dig -x on each address and check whether the PTR follows a consumer naming pattern.
• Verify from the device’s own network path, not from your laptop. A device-level route and a browser extension use different exits, so testing the wrong one proves nothing about what your phones will do.

The mistakes that undo it

• A device set to Europe/Paris exiting in São Paulo. Timezone, locale and IP country are read in the same request — the contradiction costs one comparison to find and is entirely operator-created.
• Trusting the label. Resold datacenter space marketed as residential is common; the ASN check takes ten seconds and settles it.
• Several devices behind one address. The address is the correlation point, and sharing it links every account on it.
• Letting the exit change mid-session. A rotating pool without a sticky session produces a country change inside a logged-in flow.

For the full selection criteria — pool depth per country, session control, protocol support — see our guide to residential proxies for cloud phones.