What is a residential proxy and how does it work

A residential proxy routes your request through a real consumer device sitting on a home ISP connection. The target website sees an ordinary household IP address issued by an internet provider, not an address that belongs to a hosting company.

How the request flows

1. Your client sends the request to the LimeProxies gateway with your credentials.
2. The gateway picks an exit node from the residential pool that matches the location you asked for.
3. The exit node makes the request to the target site.
4. The response travels back the same way, and your client receives it.

Everything the target site can see — the source IP, the reverse DNS, the ASN — belongs to a residential ISP.

Why that matters

Sites that block automated traffic usually start by scoring the IP. Datacenter ranges are easy to identify because whole blocks are registered to hosting providers. Residential addresses are indistinguishable from real visitors at that layer, which is why they hold up on tightly defended targets such as retail, travel and social platforms.

When a residential proxy is the wrong tool

Residential exits are slower than datacenter exits and are billed by traffic rather than by IP. If your target does not fingerprint IPs aggressively — internal tools, uptime checks, most APIs — a datacenter proxy is faster and cheaper.

See also What is the difference between Datacenter vs Residential proxies.