What Is a Residential Proxy and How Does It Work?

Proxy servers are private and anonymous tools that help internet users to surf the web without exposing their identity and location. This way they can access any website without sacrificing anonymity or personal information. 

There are many proxy types on the market. However, here, we’ll deal with residential proxies. Residential proxy services allow you to access any content anywhere, change your location according to your needs, and hide your identity when harvesting data from the web. 

You can use them to manage multiple social media accounts and scrape multiple target websites without getting banned or detected.

What defines a residential proxy?

Residential proxies provide the advantage of having multiple IPs for changing locations by mobile carrier, city, or country. You can appear as a real user in any location and browse the web without any interference.

They protect your identity and information from general web traffic by masking your IP and hiding your location. Each time you send a request to web servers to see some content, a residential proxy reroutes your traffic through its servers, assigns you a new IP, and keeps your identity and online activity anonymous.

How residential proxy server works

Residential proxies use intermediary servers to route your internet traffic. They have a vast pool of physical IP addresses across multiple locations worldwide. When you go online, your proxy server replaces your IP with an alternative one and channels your traffic through required servers on the web. 

Each alternative residential IP address belongs to a real device. Thanks to that, residential proxies can make you appear as a genuine user of the target website, making them perfect solutions for various activities such as web scraping. 

In addition, residential proxies allow you to target specific locations, cities, and even entire countries and offer enhanced security through HTTPS encryption.

The main uses of a residential proxy

Residential proxies are more trustworthy, reliable, and secure than other proxy types. You can use them for various browsing and online activities, ranging from ad verification and market research to market price monitoring, SEO, and social media management.

Web scraping for market research

Today, the needs of digital marketing campaigns far exceed organic reach, social media posts, and casual ads. Contemporary digital businesses must study their respective industries, markets, and competitors to gather data and fuel their decision-making. 

A web scraping bot is the most effective way to extract, organize, and gather all of that necessary data and obtain actionable insights. 

Since residential proxies have a huge IP pool, they allow users to deploy large-scale scraping operations and use multiple rotating IPs to avoid detection and getting banned. 

They are the best solution for scraping top websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. You can also use them for ad verification and pricing comparison.

Keeping track of social media marketing

Social media marketing is the most effective way to attract more customers and grow a business in the digital business landscape. 

Thanks to its large IP pool, the top residential proxy server provider allows you to create and manage multiple social media accounts. 

You can launch social media marketing campaigns, ask your audience for feedback, use organic and paid reach to build a considerable following, and more.

Looking for copyright infringement

There are several types of infringement on the internet:

Since residential proxies come with millions of physical IPs, you can use them for browsing the web and ascertaining whether cybercriminals are using your copyrighted materials for personal gains. 

Residential proxies are also ideal for brand protection, ensuring law compliance, customer protection against fraud, boosting legal efficiency, and protecting brand reputation. 

Business leaders use residential proxy services to detect copyright infringement, validate threats, and enforce countermeasures accordingly.

What you should know before getting a residential proxy

Here are some things that you should know before you purchase a residential proxy service.

Conclusion

Residential proxies have several legitimate ethical and legal uses. They allow you to browse the web anonymously, unblock geo-restricted websites, manage multiple social media accounts, monitor your competitors, study markets, compare prices, and protect your brand.