How a residential pool works#
A provider aggregates many household devices whose owners share bandwidth, ideally with explicit consent and payment. A gateway receives your request, selects a device that matches the location you asked for, and forwards the request through it. On the next connection it may pick another device (rotation) or keep the same one for a while if you asked for a sticky session.
Strengths and limits#
| Strength | Limit |
|---|---|
| Scored like a home visitor; passes most bot checks | Household lines add a few hundred milliseconds and vary in speed |
| Widest coverage: every country, most cities, many ISPs | You share the pool; an exit is yours only for the length of a session |
| Location changes per request without new credentials | Billed per GB, so heavy pages and media cost real money |
| Rotation defeats per-IP rate limits | Not the right tool when one address must stay fixed for weeks |
When to choose it#
Web scraping of sites that score visitors, SERP and ad verification, price and availability monitoring, travel fares, brand protection: anything where the target must see a local human. For accounts that need one fixed address, ISP proxies fit better; for bulk collection from open sources, datacenter proxies are cheaper.
How it works at ProxShift#
ProxShift residential proxies draw on a pool of 70M+ household IPs in 199 countries and territories from res.proxshift.com, port 9000 (HTTP/S) and 9001 (SOCKS5), with -cc-, -state- (US), -city- and -asn- targeting and sticky sessions up to 24 hours. Traffic is billed per GB from $2.45 down to $0.95 at volume, at one rate worldwide, and never expires.
Questions people ask#
Are residential proxies legal?
Using them is legal in most jurisdictions; what you do through them must be too. Reputable providers source addresses with the owner's consent and enforce an acceptable use policy that forbids attacks, fraud and unauthorized access.
How long can I keep one residential IP?
For the length of a sticky session, typically up to 10 or 30 minutes at many providers and up to 24 hours at ProxShift. A household device can go offline at any time, in which case the session continues on another exit in the same location.
Why are residential proxies billed per GB?
Because the scarce resource is household bandwidth, not addresses. Per-GB billing also lets the price follow volume: large purchases get a lower rate per gigabyte.