A residential proxy routes your requests through IP addresses that consumer ISPs assigned to real households, so a target site sees ordinary home-internet traffic instead of a server in a datacenter.
Sites judge an IP by its ASN — the network that owns it. Datacenter IPs belong to hosting providers (AWS, Hetzner, OVH), and since real people rarely browse from those ranges, anti-bot systems treat them with suspicion by default. Residential IPs belong to consumer ISPs like Comcast or Vodafone and inherit the trust of ordinary home traffic.
Mobile proxies go a step further: carrier-grade NAT means thousands of real phone users share each mobile IP, so blocking one causes too much collateral damage for sites to do it casually. The trust ladder — datacenter, residential, mobile — is also the price ladder.
Residential pools are built from real devices whose owners route third-party traffic — typically via bandwidth-sharing SDKs embedded in free apps, or paid peer-to-peer programs. Consent quality varies significantly between providers, which is why sourcing ethics is a real evaluation criterion and reputable providers publish how their pool is built.
Because the supply is real households, residential bandwidth is priced per GB (commonly several dollars per GB) rather than per IP, and sessions can drop when the underlying device goes offline. The standard production pattern is tiered routing: cheap datacenter IPs for tolerant targets, residential only where the anti-bot posture demands it.
How Crawlora handles this
Crawlora runs this tiering for you — requests route through datacenter or vetted residential pools based on what the target actually requires, with rotation and session stickiness managed internally, and you're billed only when the request succeeds.
Related reading
Glossary
FAQ
Operating and using them is legal in most jurisdictions; the legal questions attach to how the IPs were sourced (was the household's consent informed?) and what you do through them. Reputable providers document consent-based sourcing — treat opaque sourcing as a risk signal.
Supply is scarce and metered: each IP is a real household's connection with limited bandwidth, acquired through consent-based programs that cost money to run. Datacenter IPs are commodity server resources that can be spun up by the thousand.
When the target actively blocks datacenter ASN ranges — common on e-commerce, sneaker/ticketing, social platforms, and anything behind strict Cloudflare or Akamai configurations. If a site tolerates datacenter traffic, paying residential rates for it is wasted budget.
Browse Crawlora APIs, test a request in Playground, and move from scraping infrastructure work to production data workflows.