In Search of the Cheapest Residential Proxies

It seems a very long time since I first started playing around with proxy servers, indeed it was about 1996 when I had the opportunity to start playing around with them. I worked in a technical college, and we were donated a hugely expensive Sun Sparc which nobody had a clue what to do with (including me) with a connection to JANET. Fortunately, as it was a college, in the summer everyone disappeared bar a few full-time staff and I had days and weeks to play around with my new toy and I read a document written from CERN about proxies by Ari Luotonen. I started to learn about proxies and even bought Ari’s book when he released it a few years later – Web Proxy Servers.

The technology was pretty exciting and new, in fact the first proxies were developed in the CERN labs alongside the birth of HTTP and the world wide web. Proxies even became a source of employment, as the internet age developed, and we moved to a world where everyone wanted and expected the internet at their workplace. These web proxies were essential in controlling and managing internet access to corporate networks. Of course, as web presences developed there was even more ‘proxy based’ support work with the requirements reverse proxies being installed on corporate networks and datacentres to protect the back-end servers too.

However fast forward to 2024 and I probably spend more time using proxies than setting them up and fixing them. Frankly it’s easier to let other people deal with the headaches of securing, configuring and optimizing servers which are almost always hammered most of the time. So, I have become a bit of an expert in the proxy service marketplace too, which can be extremely bewildering when you first venture into it. Anyway, the point of this post is in response to a couple of questions I got mailed to me on this site – basically where to buy residential proxies?

When you’re looking online for proxies for whatever task, most of their descriptions now refer not to the specific technology but rather the IP addresses that they are allocated. So for instance you’ll hear about US proxies or datacenter proxies which basically refer to their location and the classification of the IP addresses they are assigned. As many of these servers are used to hide the client’s location, where and what the IP address is has become extremely important.

If I want to use one to watch UK television for example, then it needs a British IP address assigned to it otherwise it won’t work. You can read all about what it takes to be a BBC proxy in another post on this site. Similarly, as well as location, there is another component – whether the proxy uses an IP address which is classified as residential IPs or commercial ones. Residential IPs are normally assigned by an ISP to home internet connections, so is among the most trustworthy of IP addresses available online. Which is why social media marketers, researchers, and spammers all prizing these addresses highly – they make you look like an innocent home user.   If you want to stay under the radar, then residential proxies are definitely the way to go.  Or in 2024 you can even get residential VPNs based in specific countries for your geo-targeting requirements.

Where to Buy Residential Proxies

So if you’re looking to place multiple adverts on Craigslist, buy limited edition sneakers or simply trying to run a number of Instagram accounts to fund your lifestyle then residential ips are the ones you probably need.   A residential proxy is much harder to detect than the datacenter proxies which are everywhere.  Herein lies a little problem as the reason they are so trusted is because they’re normally only assigned by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to ordinary users who sign up for broadband accounts with them. Therefore, they’re very tricky to get hold of to exploit for commercial purposes but they’re definitely needed.

Just for illustration, for my security and privacy needs (as well as watching the BBC) I have used for many years the excellent Identity Cloaker. It’s fine for bypassing some blocks and great for online anonymity and security yet the vast majority of its IP addresses are from commercial ranges so for some purposes they won’t work. Lots of websites have determined that if you’re coming from a commercial IP range then there’s a high change, you’re using a proxy server (particularly if there are multiple connections). So, if you’re trying to run numerous online marketing tasks then you’re likely to get block or filtered very quickly.  It can work for many tasks though although a single UK static residential proxy may be better value.

Many businesses and marketers for example run multiple Instagram accounts in order to promote their businesses or products. It’s well known for being a great platform for doing promotional posts on. However, if you run lots of accounts from commercial addresses, you’re much likely to get flagged by Instagram as a commercial user and your accounts banned, restricted or even deleted. Yet if you run these from a proxy with a residential IP pool then you’re much, much safer. Also, you’ll get better and more accurate results for web scraping too.  The same can be said for hundreds of other platforms and E-commerce sites, residential IP addresses are great camouflage.

But as we mentioned earlier, they are much, much harder to obtain and if you want to buy dedicated residential proxies for your use exclusively then it’s going to cost a lot of money. Fortunately, though some of the more advanced companies have managed to establish decent networks of rotating residential IP ranges to assign to their servers. These used to be very expensive but new technology like backconnect servers with rotating IPs have brought the unit price down significantly.  I wouldn’t say you can buy a residential proxy cheaply but they’re certainly much more reasonable now from some proxy provider companies.

Cheapest Residential Proxies that Actually Work

Here are two proxy provider companies that I currently use to supply me with residential proxies. I like to use different companies as it helps rotate the addresses used with my various social media accounts.  Both offer cheap proxies which are also reliable and importantly great customer support.  Check them out they could be the residential proxy service that’s right for you.

Storm Proxies – these guys seriously know what they’re doing (helpful customer service too) and have been around for many years. They have a fast 1GB proxy network with thousands of proxies with all sorts of IP ranges including a large selection of residential addresses. You can also buy proxies optimized (usually means not used and blacklisted) for lots of different platforms for marketing on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and lots of others. Crucially they own the hardware that their proxies run on, whereas many firms simply rent or lease their servers. This improves support and gives them much more control on configuration of the services.

Rotating Proxies  – a new find for me and I’m quite pleased about them.  Recommended by a friend who runs a huge number of very profitable social media accounts, they have lots of different types of proxies include some great residential ones.  The ones I was recommended are the premium dedicated residential proxies. They’re all super-fast and have unmetered bandwidth, so you don’t have to worry about building up bills.  They’re not as cheap as rotating and shared proxies but generally much safer because only you are using them, unfortunately they only have US IP addresses at the moment but hoping that might change.  They also have static residential proxies you can use too.

Now I’ve used a few others, but currently for residential addresses these seem to work best at least for my activities.  What’s important with any service provider is that you talk to them and their customer support.   Letting them know your use cases, means they get a chance to allocate not just cheap proxies but ones that work for your purpose.

There is one other service provider which you should be aware of, if only because they have by far the largest network of residential IPs .  Their dedicated proxies also offer the largest configuration options where you can tailor most aspects of your connection.

They’re called Bright Data and have an enormous residential IP address proxy network which dwarfs anybody else.   I have used them a lot in the past and it’s a very decent network with some of the best residential addresses available.   However these are not cheap proxies but they’re part of the largest residential proxy network on the planet.  If you’re looking for the best and safest and don’t mind paying for them then they’re the ones you need.  They also offer the facility to target specific areas through the proxy dashboard – so you can specify UK residential proxies or even just ones in Chicago for example.

Cheapest Residential IPs Proxies

You can lower the costs by using their filtering options at the proxy dashboard to get cheap residential ips which an adviser will help you with.

The reason that their network is so huge is that they’ve built it by creating an enormous P2P network.  Residential users sign up for their free VPN service called Hola and in exchange allow the part use of their connection and computer.   These millions of users are providing the rotating ips and  residential addresses used by Luminati’s commercial network.  I’m not entirely comfortable with this method and would certainly never use Hola myself, but to be fair they have improved the visibility of their terms and conditions.

There’s probably a large percentage of users probably have no idea that they’re sharing their computer and connection in exchange for the free VPN.  It does work through and means that you can grab residential IP addresses from virtually anywhere in the world from their 186 million users!!!  You can use in either proxy or via your own VPN client if needed.   I have to say if I was using other people’s money and marketing for a big client, I’d probably use them as they are the most business legitimate proxy providers.   Their only weakness used to be the lack of static residential addresses even on dedicated proxies.  However, they seem to have extended their range to cover this, I haven’t checked these out yet.  Remember this work great but they’re not cheap proxies, but you do get what you pay for.

 

 

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