The Best Residential Proxies for Web Scraping Compared

Guide To Finding The Best Residential Proxies For Web Scraping?

This proxy comparison tool is designed to make it easier for you to compare and find the best residential proxy plans for your particular use case.

It allows you to compare the price, features, reviews of each residential proxy plan in one place before making your decision, along with other criteria like:

• Integration: What integration options do each proxy provider provide.
• Billing: Does the proxy provider only offer monthly subscriptions or do they offer pay-as-you-go plans.
• Advanced Functionality: Does the proxy provider offer more advanced functionality like in-built Javascript rendering, country geotargeting, sticky sessions, etc.

All of these can be important factors when making a decision about which proxy provider you would like to integrate with.

So to help you make the best decision, we will go through the most important factors you need to consider when choosing a residential proxy provider.

First, we're going to make sure we will quickly explain what are residential proxies?

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What Are Residential Proxies?

Residential proxies are proxies that route their traffic through someones home or office internet router, not a datacenter. Making it look like the request is coming from someones house or local business.

Residential proxies differ from data center proxies, in the fact the underlying IP address is own by a Internet Service Provider (ISPs) and has been assigned to a specific device, such as a computer, mobile phone or tablet.

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When To Use Residential Proxies?

Residential proxies have a lot of benefits over datacenter proxies that make them a great option in certain situations. But they also have some drawbacks, namely speed and cost.

Residential proxies are significantly more expensive than data center proxies (upwards of 10X more expensive) and often have higher latencies too.

As a result, residential proxies shouldn't be your go-to proxy option, instead, you should focus on using them if you encounter one of the following situations:

• Anti-Bots & CAPTCHAs: If you a scraping a website and they are using sophisticated anti-scraping technologies like Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX, then using residential proxies is a great way to bypass them and scrape the data you need. Websites are much more reluctant to block requests coming from residential IPs than datacenter IPs.

• Country & City Level Geotargeting: Some websites (search engines, e-commerce stores, etc.) will return different data depending on where the request is coming from so to reliably scrape the data you need you need the ability to control the location of the IP address. Because residential proxies are real IP addresses in peoples homes and businesses, they give a huge diversity in the places they are located.

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How To Integrate Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are very easy to integrate into your scrapers. Most providers give you access to their residential proxy pools through a single endpoint proxy, and where they manage the rotation and selection of those proxies on their end.

Meaning you just need to send your requests to a proxy endpoint like BrightData's:

http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225

And they will route your request through their residential proxy network for you, and return the HTTP response after the request has been completed.

Integrating this proxy endpoint into your web scrapers is very easy, as it normally is just a parameter you add to the request. No need to worry about rotating proxies or managing bans, etc.

Here is a simple example using Python:

import requests

proxies = {
   'http': 'http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225',
   'https': 'http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225',
}

url = 'http://example.com/'

response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies, auth=('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD'))

Most other web scraping tools like ScrapeBox, Apify, PhantomBuster, etc. all support this type of proxy integration out of the box making it a very simple setup.

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Paying For Residential Proxies

Typically, proxy providers don't sell lists of residential proxy IPs to you. Instead, they give you access to a single endpoint that allows you to send requests to their residential proxy pools.

From here, you are charged based on the amount of bandwidth your requests consume when you use it. The most common metric is pay per GB of bandwidth used.

Proxy providers either offer subscriptions to their residential proxy pools which gives you a set amount of bandwidth you can use in a month, or a few offer pay-as-you-go options where you only pay for the bandwidth you consume.

These pay-as-you-go options are much more expensive than residential proxy subscriptions. With pay-as-you-go plans costing about $13-15 per GB, whereas residential proxy subscriptions can cost anywhere from $1 to $12 per GB depending on the proxy provider you choose and how big of a plan you commit to.

As said previously, residential proxies are one of the more expensive proxy options. So you should look at other proxy solutions before choosing to go with a residential proxy plan.

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Alternatives to Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are expensive, so you should always be on the lookout for other proxy options.

Datacenter Proxies

The cheapest alternative to using residential proxies is to use datacenter proxies. You can either buy lists of datacenter proxies, or pay per GB of bandwidth consumed at about 10% the cost of residential proxies.

However, to use these effectively you must have a more sophisticated proxy management infrastructure that optimizes proxy rotation and selection, and also uses optimized header configurations to bypass websites' anti-bot defences.

Smart Proxies

Often the easier and better solution is to use a smart proxy solution that manages the entire proxy infrastructure for you. You send them the pages you would like to scrape and they return the HTML response of that page.

These smart proxy solutions handle all the proxy rotation & selection, header optimization, ban page & CAPTCHA detection, and retries for you on their end.

As a extra bonus, you only pay for successful requests. So it is a much more predictable way of scaling your web scraping.

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Where Do Residential Proxies Come From?

Where proxy providers get their residential proxies can be a bit opaque.

Some proxy providers treat it as a closely held secret, whilst others are very open about they get their proxies.

In truth there are 5 main ways proxy providers get their residential proxies:

• Free VPNs
• Proxy SDKs In Apps & Chrome Extensions
• Paid Bandwidth Products
• Device Proxy Farms
• Proxy Reselling

If would like to learn more about this topic then we have written a whole guide on Where Do Residential Proxies Come From?.

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The Legality Of Residential Proxies

When proxy providers first started offering residential proxies to their users, it was a bit of a dark secret about how did they acquire access to these residential IP addresses and do they have permission from the owners to use them.

Thankfully, in the last few years things have significantly moved out of the shadows and the proxy provider industry have become much more transparent about how they get their residential proxies and how they have explicit permission to use them.

Sites like Honeygrain and PacketStream pay users to let them use their IP address as a residential proxy and then they sell access to this proxy network to web scrapers and other proxy providers.