5 Main Benefits of Residential Proxies Compared to Other Solutions
Zynthoris Phaelindrose 
There’s no doubt that proxy servers are useful tools for keeping you anonymous online and enabling various automation measures. The choice of proxy requires careful consideration of options, especially with the vast price differences between types. Residential proxies are known as one of the most expensive proxies.
This article will argue that the price of residential proxies is fully justified by the five main benefits you receive when using them. Let’s delve into them one by one while defining them and comparing them with other proxy types and similar services.
IP Address Legitimacy
A residential proxy is created by running a physical device, usually a laptop, in a household with a consumer internet connection. It ensures the highest possible IP address legitimacy since each IP string can be traced back to an actual device operating, and this is verified by an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Other proxy types, such as data center ones, are created in commercial data centers that use business-tier internet and powerful servers running virtual machines to generate IP addresses. When you use such proxies, every website can rather easily locate that they are commercial and conclude that you are a proxy user.
Such IP address legitimacy is crucial for hiding your online identity, especially when in complicated situations, such as running online bots or managing multiple social media accounts. You want your proxy server to draw as much attention as possible, and residential proxies are simply the best option for this.
Location Accuracy
Every major proxy provider has a dozen countries available for each proxy type. Some even like to brag that hundreds of thousands of IP locations are available globally. It all means little when you need proxies targeting not just a specific country but an exact city or neighborhood.
Due to being hosted on a physical household device, residential proxies are the only ones that can achieve it. The ISP of the user who hosts the residential proxy can verify that you are connecting from a specific location to each website you visit. The connection is tied to a specific internet service user.
This is different from data center proxy IPs, which can only send approximate location information since thousands of them are hosted on the same servers in one data center. Mobile proxies cannot give such accurate locations as well, as they rely on cellular towers that rotate IPs constantly.
Location Selection
While most proxy types also have large numbers of IP addresses available, it’s a much more important selling point for residential proxies. Since the IP addresses are highly legitimate and can target locations accurately, providers go to great lengths to have the widest IP selection.
Most use cases require users to have different IP locations readily available. People in bulk purchasing, for example, are on the constant lookout for new IPs as they need multiple different locations to maximize purchasing power. Websites limit how much one user or one region can purchase, so the more different locations you can target, the better.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that location selection depends more on the provider than on the proxy type. Some have more residential IPs, while others primarily sell datacenter or mobile ones. Residential proxies are becoming more widely available because providers have found various ways to source them.
For example, certain apps might ask users to share their devices to be used as residential proxies in exchange for services or money. That way, it’s much easier for providers to source a variety of proxies than making deals with large corporations for their data centers.
Increased Level of Anonymity
Strictly speaking, all proxies can be anonymous. All it takes for it to not inform the target websites about the fact that they are proxies. However, there is more about online anonymity than this. Websites take various measures to determine whether a visitor’s IP address is from a proxy server.
IP legitimacy helps residential proxies here since they look much more like ordinary users. Other proxy types can supplement the lack of legitimacy by rotation and some other means, but they still don’t come close to residential proxies. The reason is that most internet users use either mobile or residential IPs to connect.
Anonymity is all about blending in with the crowd. The bigger the crowd, the easier it is to blend in. That’s why data center proxies have to use measures such as rotation to cover the user’s tracks. Web administrators are also reluctant to impose restrictions on residential or mobile IPs since it’s highly likely that it will affect all other users as well.
Wide Application
A good decade ago, it was common to think that residential and mobile proxies were only viable for simple web browsing and anonymity tasks. Consumer internet connections were slow, and devices could not route the traffic of others. This situation has been completely transformed with faster optical fiber and mobile internet.
Nowadays, residential proxies are fit for anonymous browsing or other tasks requiring little bandwidth. They are also used for large-scale automation and data-gathering operations. Datacenter proxies are still faster for such applications when we consider the raw transfer speed, but there’s also the question of IP blocks.
With a residential proxy, you are less likely to get your proxy banned, shadow-banned, receive continuous CAPTCHA requests, or other IP-related restrictions. So, while the transfer speed can be slower at times, the overall time it takes to collect the data will be shorter.
With the current trend of web scraping and related applications, it could be argued that residential proxies are set to become the only viable option for collecting data. Websites are simply getting too defensive.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the service you get with residential proxies earns you much more than what you spend. Based on the five benefits discussed here, we could even argue that residential proxies are the most economical option, even if the initial price tag states differently.
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