# Residential proxy

A residential proxy routes traffic through an IP address that an internet service provider assigned to a real household device. Because the address belongs to a consumer ISP and behaves like one, websites treat the request as an ordinary visitor from that home and city. Residential proxies are usually sold as a rotating pool billed per gigabyte, with country, state, city and ASN targeting and sticky sessions of limited duration.


## 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](https://proxshift.com/glossary/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](https://proxshift.com/glossary/isp-proxy) fit better; for bulk collection from open sources, [datacenter proxies](https://proxshift.com/glossary/datacenter-proxy) 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

**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.

Source: https://proxshift.com/glossary/residential-proxy