Residential proxies — what is it?

In order to understand what residential proxies are, it is necessary to have a general idea of ​​what a proxy is. As we said earlier, a proxy in its general case is a kind of intermediary between the client and the final Internet resource.
In the world of rapidly growing Internet technologies and globalization, we are faced with the need to analyze data using proxy servers. Since the latter give us the opportunity to change the IP address, change the IP country and change the geo proxy. This allows us to virtually be in another country and get the information we need or bypass blocking.

What are the types of proxies?
At the moment we can distinguish the following types of proxies:

• Server — proxies that are located on the hardware located in the data center. These proxies generally have a fixed IP address and are defined as server proxies. Typically, such proxies have a fairly good performance indicator, since usually the hardware (servers) in the DC have constant power and a good Internet channel.
• Residential — proxies that belong to Internet providers. If it’s very simple, if we “raised” a proxy at home, on a router or laptop, it would be a resident proxy.
• Others are proxies that use, for example, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, or IBM OpenWhisk to process requests. Technically, these are server proxies, but it is difficult to classify them as standard server proxies, since their principle and methods of operation are different. This category includes all non-standard proxy solutions.

Why are residential proxies considered as the best?
Residential proxies are considered the highest quality and most reliable, as they are most trusted by services. Since the end services see you not as a server in a DC, but as a regular home Internet user.

Why is the price of residential proxies so high?
It’s all about the demand and the difficulty of supporting such proxies. Residential proxies are proxies that belong to some person. He can know about what is part of the proxy network or not. It already depends on what type the proxy structure is organized and what development path the proxy service has chosen. A high-quality proxy service will never use botnets and unverified proxy providers.

Legality of residential proxies
If residential proxies are essentially proxies based on the home Internet, then the question naturally becomes how these same proxies work. More precisely, on what basis did the service that provides the proxy get access to these addresses. There may be many options. Here is some of them:

• Botnet is one of the most infamous and illegal methods of gaining access to proxies. In fact, this is the theft of the user’s computing resources. Usually such proxies work extremely unstable. These proxies can stop working at any time, as they can be closed due to illegal distribution and their nature.
• Mutually beneficial use is one of the types of residential proxies, when the client is given the opportunity to use part of the residential network to bypass some blocking. For example, in order to access Netflix or Disney +.
• Payment for traffic — when an agreement is concluded between the user and the proxy services. The user sells his traffic. A proxy service allows its clients to use their user’s traffic.

Why do proxies keep getting more expensive?
Due to the rapid growth in the number of devices that require IPv4 for their work, these IPv4s themselves were exhausted very quickly, since at the time of the design of the Internet, we were not expected to have a huge number of IPv4 addresses. At the time of this writing, almost all IPv4s are taken. This means that in the near future, there will be no free addresses for issuing new Internet customers. And as the law of economics tells us, the less something is, the more expensive it is, especially if there is a demand for it. And for proxy servers, especially residential ones, the demand only increases every year.
To solve the problem of IPv4 deficiency should IPv6. Scary and ugly addresses. But unfortunately, this is the future that awaits us. And in a few years, there may be a large demand for IPv6.