A residential proxy sends your traffic out through an IP address that an ordinary home internet provider assigned to someone's connection.
Explanation
Sites judge visitors partly by the network an address belongs to. Addresses from home broadband and mobile carriers look like ordinary people; addresses from hosting companies look like servers. Residential proxies exist to get the first kind. Your requests leave from somebody's home connection, so anti-bot systems that challenge data-centre traffic usually let them through. That is why they are sold mostly for price monitoring, ad verification and large-scale data collection, and usually billed per gigabyte rather than per month. The hard question is where the home connections come from. A provider either pays or rewards people who knowingly share their connection, or it bundles a bandwidth-sharing component into free apps and browser extensions, where consent may be buried in terms nobody reads. At the extreme end, criminal operations have sold access to infected computers as residential proxies. If you are buying, ask the provider how its addresses are sourced. For simply reading a blocked page you do not need one: AnyProxy runs on ordinary data-centre servers, and a web proxy or VPN covers that job.
In practice
Where the addresses come from matters. In May 2024 the US Justice Department announced it had dismantled the 911 S5 botnet, which it described as likely the world's largest, built from about 19 million infected computers whose addresses were sold as residential proxies. When we checked popular "free proxy" sites on 5 October 2026, one listed as a web proxy turned out to be a paid residential-IP service rather than a browser proxy, a sign that the two categories are easy to confuse when shopping.
Sources: US DOJ - 911 S5 botnet dismantled (2024) · Free web proxies, checked - AnyProxy
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