Rotating Residential Proxies

What is a rotating residential proxy?

The addresses come from people who have opted in to share a small part of their home connection, typically through an app or SDK that pays or rewards them. To a website, each request looks like it comes from an ordinary visitor on a home broadband or Wi-Fi connection in the chosen country or city.

How rotation works

You send requests to a single gateway address. The gateway picks an exit IP according to the parameters you pass, usually inside the proxy username.

Rotation on every request

Each new connection leaves through a different IP. This spreads a large number of requests across thousands of addresses, so no single IP sends enough traffic to be rate-limited. It is the default for collecting many independent pages.

Sticky sessions

You attach a session ID and the gateway keeps you on the same IP for a set time, up to about 90 minutes at most providers. This mode is what is sold as a static residential proxy. Use this when several requests must come from one visitor, for example a login followed by a few page views. The session can end early if the household device goes offline.

Targeting

Most networks let you choose the country, and often the state, city or ISP (ASN). The finer the targeting, the smaller the pool you draw from, which matters at high volume.

Strengths

• Scale. Pools contain millions of addresses, so request volume is spread thin.
• Coverage. Addresses are available in nearly every country, down to city level in many.
• Genuine household IPs. Traffic is indistinguishable by IP from normal visitors on the same ISP.
• Nothing to manage. One endpoint; rotation, retries and pool health are the provider's job.

Weaknesses

• Variable speed. Performance depends on the household connection behind each IP.
• Sessions can drop. A device can disconnect at any time, so long sessions are not guaranteed.
• Cost grows with traffic. Billing is per gigabyte, so image-heavy or video-heavy targets become expensive.
• Shared pool. Other customers use the same addresses, so individual IP reputation is outside your control.

If you need the same address for days or weeks, an ISP proxy is the better fit. The comparison page walks through the decision.

How pricing works

Rotating residential proxies are sold per gigabyte of traffic. Three things decide what you pay:

• Package size. The price per gigabyte drops as the monthly commitment grows.
• Pay-as-you-go or subscription. Pay-as-you-go costs more per gigabyte but has no monthly minimum, and with some providers the traffic does not expire.
• Provider tier. Larger networks with finer targeting and enterprise support sit at the top of the range.

To keep costs down, block images, fonts and media in your scraper, cache what you can, and only use residential traffic for the requests that need it. Check each provider's site for live prices.

Sourcing matters

Because these IPs belong to real people, how a provider obtains them is worth checking. Reputable networks get clear consent from device owners, compensate them, and let them opt out. Ask the provider how its pool is sourced; a vague answer is a reason to look elsewhere. Our provider overview notes what each company says about this.

Frequently asked questions