Residential proxy

Achieve a higher level of anonymity using IP addresses from human users. Access a wider pool of proxies and reduce blocking by websites' anti-scraping measures.

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Residential proxies use IP addresses assigned by Internet Service Providers to the homes and offices of actual users. Unlike datacenter proxies, traffic from residential proxies is indistinguishable from that of legitimate users.

This solution allows you to access a larger pool of servers than datacenter proxy. This makes it a better option in cases when you need a large number of different IP addresses.

Residential proxies support IP address rotation and sessions.

Pricing is based on data traffic. It is measured for each connection made and displayed on your dashboard in the Apify Console.

Limitations

Apify provides 2 levels of residential proxy:

Level	Availability	Supported domains	Other limitations
Restricted residential proxy	Every user	>500 domains	Requires man-in-the-middle access for the connection
Unrestricted residential proxy	Enterprise level accounts	Entire web	None

Restricted residential proxy

Restricted residential proxy is available for all the users with some conditions.

Firstly, restricted residential proxy supports only certain domains and paths. The pool of 500 domains is increased every month and covers the most frequent use cases. Any traffic outside this pool of domains will go through datacenter proxy.

The second limitation is that restricted residential proxy uses the man-in-the-middle system to monitor traffic and activities and so requires acceptance of an SSL certificate. This is automatically handled by Apify SDK and Crawlee for both Puppeteer and Playwright. To manually check if a connection is using a man-in-the-middle connection, head over to the Apify Proxy page.

Unrestricted residential proxy

Unrestricted residential proxy neither limits the domains you can access nor requires a man-in-the-middle access to traffic. However, it's provided only to enterprise-level accounts on a per-request basis and under an additional contract.

Contact us if you would like to use the unrestricted residential proxy or for more information.

Connecting to residential proxy

Connecting to residential proxy works the same way as datacenter proxy, with two differences.

1. The groups username parameter should always specify RESIDENTIAL.

2. You can specify the country in which you want your proxies to be.

How to set a proxy group

When using standard libraries and languages, specify the groups parameter in the username as groups-RESIDENTIAL.

For example, your proxy URL when using the got-scraping JavaScript library will look like this:

const proxyUrl = 'http://groups-RESIDENTIAL:<YOUR_PROXY_PASSWORD>@proxy.apify.com:8000';

In the Apify SDK, you set the group in your proxy configuration:

import { Actor } from 'apify';

await Actor.init();
// ...
const proxyConfiguration = await Actor.createProxyConfiguration({
    groups: ['RESIDENTIAL'],
});
// ...
await Actor.exit();

How to set a proxy country

When using standard libraries and languages, specify the country parameter in the username as country-COUNTRY-CODE.

For example, your username parameter when using Python 3 will look like this:

username = "groups-RESIDENTIAL,session-my_session,country-JP"

In the Apify SDK, you set the country in your proxy configuration using two-letter country codes. Specify the groups as RESIDENTIAL, then add a countryCode parameter.

import { Actor } from 'apify';

await Actor.init();
// ...
const proxyConfiguration = await Actor.createProxyConfiguration({
    groups: ['RESIDENTIAL'],
    countryCode: 'FR',
});
// ...
await Actor.exit();

Username examples

Use randomly allocated IP addresses from all available countries:

groups-RESIDENTIAL

A random proxy from the US:

groups-RESIDENTIAL,country-US

Set a session and select an IP address from the United States:

groups-RESIDENTIAL,session-my_session_1,country-US

Session persistence

When using residential proxy with the session parameter set in the username, a single IP address is assigned to the session ID provided after you make the first request.

Session IDs represent IP addresses. Therefore, you can manage the IP addresses you use by managing sessions. [More info]

This IP/session ID combination is persisted for 1 minute. Each subsequent request resets the expiration time to 1 minute.

If the proxy server becomes unresponsive or the session expires, a new IP address is selected for the next request.

If you really need to persist the same session, you can try sending some data using that session (e.g. every 20 seconds) to keep it alive.
Providing the connection is not interrupted, this will let you keep the IP address for longer.

To learn more about sessions and IP address rotation, see the proxy overview page.