What Is a Residential Proxy?

A residential proxy sends your request through a real household device on a consumer internet connection, so the site you are calling sees an IP address an ordinary internet provider assigned to a home rather than an address in a datacenter range. Because that address belongs to an ISP whose subscribers are the site’s own audience, filtering it costs the site real visitors — which is why residential IPs get through where datacenter IPs are challenged.

You point your client at one endpoint, rp.evomi.com, and authenticate with a username and password. Evomi picks an IP from the pool, forwards your request from it and returns the response. Targeting and session keys are appended to the password, so switching country or holding an IP is a change to a string rather than a change of endpoint. By default every request leaves from a different IP.

From a global network of volunteer nodes that opt in to share their connection, which is what the "ethically sourced" claim on this page refers to. Evomi is ISO 27001 certified and Swiss-operated, and the sourcing is the reason the pool holds up: addresses that were taken without consent are the ones targets recognise and block first.

Datacenter is cheaper and faster and makes sense wherever the target does not check who owns the address. Residential costs more per GB because the addresses belong to real ISP subscribers, which is what gets you past the checks that stop datacenter ranges. The honest test is to try the cheap option first and move up only on the targets that block it.

Rotating residential draws from a pool of household devices and is billed per gigabyte, so the address changes and the cost follows your traffic. Static residential is one residential-registered IP hosted on a premium network, billed per IP with unlimited bandwidth, so the address stays yours for as long as you keep it. Pick static when an account or a session has to keep seeing the same address for weeks.

Residential is the default for volume work — far cheaper per GB, and enough trust for most targets. Mobile earns its higher price on the targets that treat a carrier address as their most credible visitor, such as social platforms, mobile app endpoints and ad checks on mobile inventory.

Both, at no extra cost. Rotation is the default: a new IP on every request. A session key holds one IP for 30 minutes by default, and the lifetime parameter extends that to 1440 minutes — a full 24 hours. A hardsession key holds the same address for as long as the network allows instead. Concurrent sessions are unlimited on every plan.

Rarely. A free residential IP is either an address whose owner never agreed to carry your traffic, or one so heavily reused that targets already recognise it — and sharing the list makes both worse. A paid pool of consenting nodes is the thing being bought, not the bandwidth.

Proxies are generally legal, but the legality depends on how they are used and on the jurisdiction. Evomi prohibits illegal activity and email-related use under its Acceptable Use Policy, and we recommend taking legal advice for your own use case and location.