Residential proxies: questions
How residential traffic is counted, how targeting and sticky sessions work on our gateway, and what to expect from home IPs.
Residential exits are home internet connections. You buy traffic in GB, and every setting (country, city, ISP, session) goes into the login. The full rules are in location targeting and rotating vs sticky sessions.
What is a residential proxy?
A proxy whose exit IP belongs to a home internet connection, registered to a consumer internet provider. Many sites treat requests from hosting ranges more strictly than requests from households, which is why residential IPs are used for price checks, local search results and public data collection.
With AeonProxy you do not get a fixed list of IPs. You connect to one gateway, and it gives each connection an exit from the residential pool that matches the keys in your login.
Do residential proxies expire?
The traffic does not. Gigabytes you buy stay on your balance until you use them, with no monthly reset, for as long as your account is open. Only free trial traffic has an end date.
The exit IPs are not yours to keep: a rotating login gets a new IP for every connection, and a sticky one holds an IP for up to 60 minutes.
How is residential traffic counted?
In GB, with the bytes in both directions: what you send and what the sites send back. The gateway counts every connection of your login and of its sub-users, whatever the number of threads.
Pages with many images and videos use the most. Block media in your scraper or browser profile where you do not need it. Usage by hour and day is on the Statistics tab of the Residential page and in the usage API.
Can I choose a country, region or city?
Yes, with keys in the login: -cc- for the country, -st- for a state or region and -city- for a city, as in LOGIN-cc-us-st-texas-city-dallas. Country codes are two lowercase letters (the United Kingdom is gb). Region and city values are the names from the dashboard's lists written as lowercase letters and digits: "new york" becomes newyork.
Region and city lists exist for every country. A value outside the lists, or a typo, is refused with 407; the gateway never falls back to the whole country. Cities match less often than countries, partly because location databases disagree, so check the exit on the IP checker when the city matters.
Can I choose the internet provider (ISP)?
Yes, in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany so far. Add -isp- with a name from the dashboard's ISP list, for example LOGIN-cc-us-isp-comcastcable. Other countries have no ISP list yet, so an ISP key there is refused with 407.
Can I target a ZIP code or postcode?
No. Targeting goes down to the city. For checks that depend on a ZIP code or postcode, use an exit in the right city and set the code in the site's own location or store selector.
How long does a sticky IP last?
As long as you set with -ttl-: 1 to 60 minutes, or 10 minutes when you leave it out. Add -sid- with any key of letters and digits, as in LOGIN-cc-us-sid-abc12345-ttl-30, and every connection with that key leaves from the same IP until the time runs out. Then the key moves to a new IP with the same targeting.
An IP can drop earlier if the home connection behind it goes offline. Lines from the dashboard generator carry the generator's Session time as their -ttl- value, and that field starts at 1 minute.
Can I keep one residential IP for a day or longer?
No. 60 minutes is the most a sticky session holds, and there is no way to keep one residential IP for days. For work that spans many sessions, such as an antidetect browser profile, give the profile its own sticky key and keep the same country and city keys. Each new session then gets a new IP from the same place.
Rotating or sticky: which should I use?
Rotating (no -sid-) gives every connection a new IP. Use it for collecting many independent pages or checking search results. Sticky keeps one IP through a sign-in, a cart or any multi-step flow that a site expects from one visitor.
Rotation happens per connection, not per request: a tool that keeps a connection open sends all its requests on it through the same IP.
Are residential IPs shared with other customers?
The residential pool is shared by nature, so an exit IP you get may have served other customers before. A sticky key keeps one IP for your session; it does not make the IP yours alone.
Which countries can I target?
The country picker in the dashboard generator lists every country you can target, with the regions and cities of each. The same lists come from the locations API, and all locations has guides to the most requested countries.