proxy

Residential Proxy

An IP address assigned by an ISP to a real residential device, used to route scraping requests through genuine consumer IPs.

A residential proxy is an IP address that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigned to a real home or mobile device. When a scraper routes its requests through a residential IP, the target website sees a genuine consumer connection rather than a datacenter origin — making it far less likely to trigger bot detection or IP bans.

Residential IPs are valuable because anti-bot systems maintain reputation databases of known datacenter IP ranges (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and thousands of hosting providers) and block them by default. A residential IP from a real ISP like Comcast, AT&T, or a mobile carrier carries no such negative signal. The tradeoff is higher cost and lower throughput compared to datacenter proxies.

AlterLab's Tier 3 and above use rotating residential proxies sourced from an ethically managed pool across 195+ countries. The IP selection is automatic — you specify a country code in the request and AlterLab routes through a residential IP in that region.

Examples

# Route through a US residential IP
{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "country_code": "US",
  "proxy_type": "residential"
}

Related Terms

Datacenter Proxy
An IP address hosted in a commercial data centre rather than assigned by a residential ISP — faster but more easily detected by anti-bot systems.
Rotating Proxy
A proxy configuration that automatically assigns a different IP address for each request or at a set interval to prevent IP-based rate limiting.
IP Rotation
The practice of cycling through multiple IP addresses across requests so no single IP triggers rate limits or bans.
Proxy Pool
A managed collection of proxy IP addresses used to distribute outbound requests across multiple origins and stay below per-IP rate limits.
Anti-Bot Protection
Systems deployed by websites to detect and block automated traffic using TLS fingerprinting, CAPTCHA challenges, and behavioural analysis.
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    Residential Proxy — Web Scraping Glossary | AlterLab