Glossary · Proxies
Residential proxy
A residential proxy is a proxy server whose exit IP address belongs to an ordinary home internet connection supplied by a consumer ISP, so the site you request sees a household address in the country or city you chose rather than a hosting range.
Reviewed 30 Oct 2026
curl -x "http://USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de:PASSWORD@proxy.arcproxies.io:8000" https://example.com/How a residential proxy works
Your client connects to the provider's gateway and authenticates. The gateway picks an exit from its residential proxy pool, forwards the request through it, and returns the response. The target only ever sees the exit's address, never yours.
Location and session behaviour are usually chosen per connection, through the proxy username, which is why most residential services are run as a backconnect gateway rather than as a list of IPs you manage yourself.
When a residential IP matters
- Pages that treat hosting ranges differently. Cloud providers publish their address ranges so customers can allow or deny them, which makes a datacenter proxy easy to classify. A household address is not on those lists.
- Content that depends on the visitor's location. Prices, search results and stock are often localised; a residential exit with geo-targeting shows you the local version.
- Browser automation and agents. A headless browser loading a full page benefits from an exit that looks like the consumers the page was built for.
Residential vs ISP vs datacentre addresses
| Type | Address registered to | Machine behind the exit | Typical trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | Consumer ISP | A subscriber's connection | Most consumer-like; slower and pricier per GB |
| ISP | Consumer ISP | Server in a datacentre | Hosted speed, consumer registration; cheaper |
| Datacentre | Hosting or cloud provider | Server in a datacentre | Fastest and cheapest; easiest to classify |
The longer comparison, with the cases where each one wins, is in residential vs datacenter proxies.
How ARC handles it
ARC Fast and ARC Ultra are the two residential proxy pools, selected with _pool-arcfast or _pool-arcultra in the username. Both take country targeting in 185+ countries, city targeting from a published metro list, and rotating or sticky sessions. Bandwidth is bought per GB, once, and does not expire.
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
What is the difference between a residential proxy and a VPN?
A VPN usually tunnels all of a device's traffic through one server, typically on a hosting address. A residential proxy is configured per application or per request and exits through a consumer internet connection, with the location and rotation chosen for each connection.
Are residential proxies slower than datacenter proxies?
Usually, yes. The traffic leaves through a consumer connection rather than a server on a data-centre backbone, so throughput and response times vary more. That is the price of the consumer address, and the reason fetch-heavy jobs that do not need one belong on a hosted pool.
Does a residential proxy hide that a script is making the request?
No. It changes the network address and nothing else. Headers, browser characteristics and request rate are still whatever your code sends, so a residential exit is a location tool, not a disguise.
How are residential proxies billed?
Most providers bill residential traffic per gigabyte rather than per IP, because exits are shared from a pool. On ARC the gigabytes are a one-time purchase with no subscription, and unused bandwidth stays on the account.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]IETF: RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics
- [2]Amazon Web Services: AWS IP address ranges
In practice