What is accurately a Residential Proxy?

I thought that I always clearly knew what a residential proxy is, and after doing a little research I have to confirm that I'm 100% confused about this topic.

When I mean "what is a residential proxy" I mean how they are set up, where are they exactly setup?

My intuition always was taking the traffic from all those "public VPN users" like the infamous Hola extension that left their residential connection available through the two-sided tunnel they were not aware of.

So technically, a residential proxy is a proxy based on fiber optics/DSL/coaxial/whatever landline internet connection, with dynamic IPs based mostly on residential users offering their IP and bandwidth, probably without their full knowledge, right?

Furthermore, I've seen many users talking about Residential and Mobile as the same term, but nowadays definitively it's not the same.

In fact, I have an 8 port hub with 8 USB modems operated with a Raspi on my attic which they technically could be considered "Residential proxy", but for me, they are 4G proxies, not residential.

Moreover, I've read @lucky.sparks multiple times suggesting that residential proxies are not as reliable as mobile proxies, but I can't see why

So if I wanted to have my own created residential proxies, what should I need? I may ask my whole family members to install a proxy software on their PCs and leave their PC online? Or may I setup a $15 Raspi Zero on their routers, right?

When the sellers say "I have rotating residential proxies" I may assume, that their IP pool is so extremely big (like thousands of houses), that they can let you "rotate" simply by switch the house. It's not the same as a "rotation IP" as in mobile (soft reset the modem), because it's unlikely that have any control about the residential ISP nor even the router, to soft reset them to force an IP change. So technically it's not a rotation but a switch. Marketing wordery?

Rotating here don't mean that you can force that modem to restart and get you a new IP
It means that you will get another IP from another house

Salamouna said:

It means that you will get another IP from another house

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SirLouen said:

When the sellers say "I have rotating residential proxies" I may assume, that their IP pool is so extremely big (like thousands of houses), that they can let you "rotate" simply by switch the house.

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Marketing wordery, as expected. This is not technically a rotation, this is a switch. But I assume they consider a rotation within their pool.

Still my biggest concern, is how they are created, how could I create myself? (in case I wanted, which is not the case, but just out of curiosity)

SirLouen said:

When the sellers say "I have rotating residential proxies" I may assume, that their IP pool is so extremely big (like thousands of houses), that they can let you "rotate" simply by switch the house.

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Yes

It's not the same as a "rotation IP" as in mobile (soft reset the modem), because it's unlikely that have any control about the residential ISP nor even the router, to soft reset them to force an IP change

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No, it's not the same.

Salamouna said:

means that you will get another IP from another house

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This is correct.

ThunderProxies said:

This is correct.

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Your case is interesting, because it's probably one of the few, that technically offer all modalities and even more (like that ISP that I've never head about)

But the information is super-scarce about what is being purchased.

PS: I've found out that ISP proxy is a synonym of "Static Residential Proxies"

The reason, why resi are worse than mobile, is the way they are sourced and how they work.

Residential proxies you can't make yourself(you can buy/rent subnets but thats not real resi), you need real devices, which most of the time are sourced by unethical ways, e.g. botnets.

Proxy software gets installed as malicious programs that the machine owner isn't aware of.

Botnet owners does not care about quality of their network so they resell those installations again and again, so one machine will probably host more than a few proxy services. Thats already bad because you can never be sure how other people are using the same IP address.

Another source way is paying for the network to the machine owner directly, e.g. honeygains, iproyal, packetstream, etc.

That's only the first step, then it comes to the residential proxy owner and their configuration, e.g. if they care about how many users they are allowing per 1 machine or if they don't.

Because of things mentioned above, most of residential proxy providers are resellers. Sometimes resellers of resellers.

The more companies to the chain, the less you can know how and when the exit node will get the abuse but by every chain member the chances only goes up.

So for example if you want to bot instagram, in worst-case scenario, you can get a proxy that is highly abused and it simply increases your chances of your accounts flagged.

Mobile proxies work a bit differently, first of all there is CGNAT which makes multiple users use the same IP by default(depends on carrier, country, etc). Other thing is that they rotate quite often. Because of those two reasons, social networks cannot ban mobile IP user by just abuse metrics from the specific IP.

lucky.sparks said:

That's only the first step, then it comes to the residential proxy owner and their configuration, e.g. if they care about how many users they are allowing per 1 machine or if they don't.

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Ok, this is what I was thinking at first because it's the most logical, but then I thought a little more, and since they say they have like zillions of IPs, I may assume that they can load balance it with ease, so this should not be a real issue

SirLouen said:

PS: I've found out that ISP proxy is a synonym of "Static Residential Proxies"

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Yes and no, ISP proxies can be DC proxies that are announced under ISP providers that offers home internet thus making them appear as residential use. It can work and can cause problems, highly depends on your own use case.

SirLouen said:

Ok, this is what I was thinking at first because it's the most logical, but then I thought a little more, and since they say they have like zillions of IPs, I may assume that they can load balance it with ease, so this should not be a real issue

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The question comes how they select them too.

e.g. when you make new session request, which one they chose to do:
a) select online device randomly from pool
b) select online device randomly from pool which isnt assigned to any other user at the time

lucky.sparks said:

Yes and no, ISP proxies can be DC proxies that are announced under ISP providers that offers home internet thus making them appear as residential use. It can work and can cause problems, highly depends on your own use case.

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So technically, you suggest that ISP = DC? There are a couple of providers that offer them both (including @ThunderProxies that has commented here already). So, it doesn't make sense that they offer the same service (which could be somewhat easily checked by the way by purchasing their service and checking where things come from). So, I doubt they could expose it that way (deceiving)

I was thinking that ISP were like real machines in the houses, like raspi zeros acting as squid or something like that, where you have much more control over the sessions.

lucky.sparks said:

b) select online device randomly from pool which isnt assigned to any other user at the time

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This makes sense when they have 0 control about their botnets and connections. But if they had their machines on the residential proxied connections, they could balance it with ease.

lucky.sparks said:

The reason, why resi are worse than mobile, is the way they are sourced and how they work.

Residential proxies you can't make yourself(you can buy/rent subnets but thats not real resi), you need real devices, which most of the time are sourced by unethical ways, e.g. botnets.

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Yes, there's the problem above, residential can come from many different sources and have different trust levels.
Virgin IP's have worked the best for me in the past because of their internal subnet system.
But not used them for 10 years.
My usage is low so I can get away with 20gig of bandwidth a month which for me is £10 from O2 mobile sim.
But I did have at one point 50 x 100gb sims for £55 a month lol !! Its was a loophole in Smarty's sales policy. Who BTW use O2 as well. If you bought 1 sim for £10 you got the 2nd sim for £9 and third third for £8 etc etc. SO I thought I'd try and game the system for laugh... I mean it would automatically stop me ordering sims after it went to £0 right? NOPE ! just kept pressing the order another sim and they kept coming. So after 18 months all the sims went dead lol And I got an email saying something like 'an error has occurred in our billing system and you now owe £5600' etc.. I just laughed and though that was a good run lol.

-- I digress --

There's also service centre or farm IP's like Oracle always free. Because they have massive trust levels (I've not tested this fully because I don't need them just yet) I have had 6 twitter accounts a sprinkling of Facebook accounts and not had a single one dropped on one of my OAF accounts. So that might be worth looking into?

Mobile proxies are similar to residential proxies in that they use an IP address provided by a mobile carrier rather than a data center. However, mobile proxies are typically associated with a specific device, such as a smartphone, and often have a higher level of anonymity and reliability compared to residential proxies.

When a seller says they have rotating residential proxies, they are typically referring to a large pool of IPs that can be switched out as needed to avoid detection or blocking. This may involve rotating through a pool of IP addresses associated with different residential addresses or using a dynamic IP assignment system that periodically changes the IP address for a given device or connection.

SirLouen said:

So technically, you suggest that ISP = DC? There are a couple of providers that offer them both (including @ThunderProxies that has commented here already). So, it doesn't make sense that they offer the same service (which could be somewhat easily checked by the way by purchasing their service and checking where things come from). So, I doubt they could expose it that way (deceiving)

I was thinking that ISP were like real machines in the houses, like raspi zeros acting as squid or something like that, where you have much more control over the sessions.

This makes sense when they have 0 control about their botnets and connections. But if they had their machines on the residential proxied connections, they could balance it with ease.

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Static ISP = DC, yes. That's why you can get them with unlimited bandwidth and some are even offering 10Gbits ports. Usually they are used for sneaker sites because they are super fast and clean.

lucky.sparks said:

Usually they are used for sneaker sites because they are super fast and clean

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But you find ISP in the same provider like 4-5x pricier for the same DC service.

When I read the descriptions of the providers, except for a couple of them that are pretty straightforward one what they are selling (for example requests for scrapers, which is pretty legit), most are really obscure about what they offer. So this led me to think on those reselling of those botnets we were talking about.

I still remember 2 years ago, there was this very famous service that paid you to become an ISP static residential proxy with a crypto currency. I wonder if it's still up (I can't remember the name now)

lucky.sparks said:

Static ISP = DC, yes. That's why you can get them with unlimited bandwidth and some are even offering 10Gbits ports. Usually they are used for sneaker sites because they are super fast and clean.

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I was talking with one of these cheap mobile proxy sellers, and they are selling also mobile 4G proxied from infected phones with randomware. Now it makes sense why there are these massive difference among rotating proxy sellers.

It's costed me a little to set my 8 local mobile proxy in 8 USB modems + usb hub + raspi (something around $400). And then the monthly costs of each SIM (although now I'm paying barely $3 for 1Gb bandwitdh, but I know that they are clean like a baby's ass), which serve me well for local scrapping purposes. But if one wants to move to USA or something like that, it is required to have some trust on the sellers, and now I see this, that even they have been infecting both residential and mobile proxies (and sharing same pool of connection among 2 to 5 users simultaneously with uptimes of less than a pair of hours per day). A massive mafia out there. Never thought that the proxy market was so obscure to be marketed so openly here in BHW.

I would say it can go even more obscure than those VCC and Negative SEO services.

SirLouen said:

I was talking with one of these cheap mobile proxy sellers, and they are selling also mobile 4G proxied from infected phones with randomware. Now it makes sense why there are these massive difference among rotating proxy sellers.

It's costed me a little to set my 8 local mobile proxy in 8 USB modems + usb hub + raspi (something around $400). And then the monthly costs of each SIM (although now I'm paying barely $3 for 1Gb bandwitdh, but I know that they are clean like a baby's ass), which serve me well for local scrapping purposes. But if one wants to move to USA or something like that, it is required to have some trust on the sellers, and now I see this, that even they have been infecting both residential and mobile proxies (and sharing same pool of connection among 2 to 5 users simultaneously with uptimes of less than a pair of hours per day). A massive mafia out there. Never thought that the proxy market was so obscure to be marketed so openly here in BHW.

I would say it can go even more obscure than those VCC and Negative SEO services.

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I can see many claims but how about backing up something under them? Otherwise you claim that all 15 pages of proxy services here are infecting innocent people, lol.

ThunderProxies said:

I can see many claims but how about backing up something under them? Otherwise you claim that all 15 pages of proxy services here are infecting innocent people, lol.

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So your 30M IPs are ethically sourced?

lucky.sparks said:

So your 30M IPs are ethically sourced?

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Define ethically? It's not infected for sure.

ThunderProxies said:

Define ethically? It's not infected for sure.

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My definition would be: exit node holders clearly know that they are being used as exit nodes for proxy service and understands what risks they are holding, including getting paid for it.

ThunderProxies said:

Otherwise you claim that all 15 pages of proxy services here are infecting innocent people, lol.

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In fact, I know 100% for sure, that some proxy sellers have their hardware (usb modems), and others simply rent VPS or micro servers with multiple IP attached to them to accomplish this. Obviously is not as cheap as infecting users pcs and phones. Basically if I had to rent my little hub, I would have to charge at least $15 per 1Gb to be slightly profitable. Probably if I purchase like 100 modems and had a better farm, I could reduce it to $10 or so.

But $3 for a dedi 1GB cell proxy is too low. But considering that the uptimes are not 100% seems kind of obvious, isn't it?

lucky.sparks said:

My definition would be: exit node holders clearly know that they are being used as exit nodes for proxy service and understands what risks they are holding, including getting paid for it.

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It's true that there are ethically hosted proxies, like peer2profit, or arc.io (not exactly a proxy, but a good idea behind), but I doubt that most of the sellers source from there.