Introduction to Residential Proxy Servers

Nowadays, the internet has created big changes in the way people process information in many different fields. Concealing one’s location is a critical part in cyber criminal activities and fraud issues in online trade are increasingly using proxy servers to hide their physical location. With the rise of residential proxies, identifying and detecting proxies have become a great challenge for organizations as most online services recognize residential IP addresses as genuine and legitimate human traffic.

Before we jump into what is a residential proxy, we should explain
what is a proxy server first. Let’s take the example of a person at home
surfing the Internet. When they visit a webpage, their computer
actually makes a connection to the web server hosting that webpage. This
is known as a direct connection. By connecting this way, the web server
is able to note down what is the IP address of the visitor along with
other info about their browsers.

A proxy server is a middleman machine which a privacy-conscious
person would use to hide their info. So instead of the user’s computer
making a connection to the web server, it will connect to the proxy
server. The proxy server then will make the connection to the web server
and forward any response to the user’s machine.

What is a residential proxy server?

A residential proxy server functions just like a normal proxy server.
It will take a request from a user and forward to the destination
machine then send back any response to the user. The big difference is
the IP address of a residential proxy server comes from a regular
Internet Service Provider (ISP).

You might ask why is there a big difference whether the IP address is
from a data center or an ISP. Lots of music and video streaming
services these days perform geolocation on their visitors’ IP address.
This means they know where you are from. If the streaming providers wish to limit their products/services to certain regions (a.k.a. geo-blocking), they can now do so. They can also adjust pricing based on your location.

Now, having an IP address from an ISP means the streaming providers
will have a hard time differentiating a legitimate user from a proxy
server. In the case of a residential proxy server, it can often be both a
normal user and a proxy server.

Detecting a residential proxy server

Because a residential proxy server uses an IP address that could be
assigned to a home user, it is notoriously hard to detect. IP2Proxy has the ability to identify anonymous IP addresses and if they are residential proxies in PX10 which contains the RES proxy type. Operators of online businesses or streaming providers just need to check the IP address with the PX10 data. If the proxy type is RES, that IP is a residential proxy server.

While proxies have legitimate uses, a lot of people tend to abuse
them to gain access to services or products. They are also frequently
used to commit credit card fraud on online stores. Therefore, being able
to detect a residential proxy server is a valuable tool for online
businesses.

Also published on: https://blog.ip2location.com/knowledge-base/what-is-a-residential-proxy-server/