Last Updated on September 26, 2023 by theadmin

Looking for Residential Proxies with Unlimited Bandwidth ? Which Proxy Service?

In this article I’m going to explain why it’s so difficult to find providers who supply residential proxies with an unlimited bandwidth option. It’s useful to realise the reasons why they are actually difficult to find as it helps to analyse the options available. After all there have been so many developments in the market with advanced IP rotation methods bringing the costs down. The costs if linked to bandwidth usage can soon escalate rapidly if you’re using them as social media proxies uploading images and videos to multiple accounts or even heavy duty web scraping.

There have been a lot of different proxy network services created over the last couple of years. Some of them are truly innovative and offer lots of different possibilities for online businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs. However increasingly there has been a need for a residential proxy that is a standard proxy service with access to residential IP addresses. What’s more providing residential proxies with unlimited bandwidth is even more difficult although you’ll find one of the extremely rare providers here – Bright Data.

Finding a Real Residential Proxy Network

It’s the residential part that makes finding a suitable proxy provider much more difficult simply because these IP addresses are much more difficult to obtain and thus tend to be more expensive too. The issue is that residential IP addresses are normally only allocated to standard home users through Internet service providers. There simply aren’t big blocks of these addresses available like there are with commercial addresses.

It’s relatively straight forward to find proxy providers who provide data center proxies but not many have access to a reliable residential proxy network. Although they do exist, it’s often difficult to find a residential proxies that meet specific requirements.

Even the largest proxy providers have limitations and imposes restrictions on specific uses to protect their proxy pool. For example it was often very hard to get a static residential address, which could only supply ‘sticky addresses’ that would stay for about ten minutes. You could spend a fortune on dedicated proxies only to find your addresses rotating at exactly the wrong time.  Slowly though proxy providers are working around this limitation with companies like IPBurger quickly expanding their networks to accommodate this.

Residential Rotating Proxies Were More Affordable But Not Always Ideal

The problem was largely on how these companies obtained their addresses, datacenter IPs were simple , cheap and easy to obtain. There’s lots of choice here, with lots of rotating proxy providers with great customer support. You can find these with all sorts of configuration options with support for things like the socks protocols and low error rates. However the primary source of residential IPs is directly from home users. Most residential proxies would piggyback their connections on the IP addresses of home connections in exchange for some service or feature. Sometimes this would be the free use of some software or service, for example Hola the free VPN provides many of the residential addresses that Bright Data uses.

 

The core issue is that these are only accessible while the software is being used or the connection was available. IT’s not directly in the control of the proxy providers, that residential address could disappear at any moment. The rotating proxies could use IP rotation procedures to switch your address to another one instantly however this wasn’t ideal in the middle of an e-commerce transaction for example. Many pairs of over priced sneakers have been lost (and their potential profit) from an inopportune switch of IP address while credit card details where being processed.

Residential Proxies are Changing

The proxy market changes almost daily, there are constant changes and innovations. Most of the improvements are regarding the IP addresses and how they’re implemented. As mentioned your connection is increasingly verified based on the quality of the IP address you’re using.  The best proxy providers know this and are constantly improving their networks.

If your proxy service is using blacklisted and spammed addresses then it’s worse than useless. Remember any account and any requests is going to be tarnished with this address, those cookies follow you everywhere.

It should be mentioned that recently Bright Data have released a static residential IP address service – however I haven’t tried it out yet so can’t comment on the costs or reliability.

One issue is that a normal residential IP address wouldn’t change very often at all and it certainly wouldn’t rotate frequently from an IP pool. Yet because of the lack of control, there was very little the proxy providers could do about this as they didn’t own the addresses. There are some companies who provide dedicated residential proxies with static residential IP addresses but many were extremely expensive to match the increased costs of obtaining the addresses.

Where to Find Residential Proxies with Unlimited Bandwidth

Most of the companies who offer residential proxies do so on a bandwidth related tariff. Depending on your requirements this can work very well, running a simple web scraper or when you just need residential IPs to buy online won’t use much traffic. However many other activities particularly if you’re dealing with any sort of scale means that your residential proxies can get extremely expensive if you pay based on bandwidth.

Again mostly, the proxy service are just passing on their costs to you – a residential proxy is just expensive to acquire and run. The only companies who are able to charge without linking them to bandwidth charges are those who have more control over the residential IPs themselves plus the hardware that they run from.

Residential Proxies Provider Options

There is at least one company who do provide residential proxies with unlimited bandwidth so if this is important to you then they’re worth checking out.

Storm Proxies were one of the very first companies to create and provide a pool of residential IP addresses to be used by their proxies. They don’t have the huge numbers and locations that the likes of Smart Proxies or IPBurger have but that’s because they don’t rely on client computers to relay their connections. Storm Proxies own all their hardware and have direct control of the IP addresses that are assigned to their proxies, they can even offer short trials with a small setup fee. If you have complicated geo targeting requirements they might not have a large enough spread and you can’t specify to city level like some companies.

However, if bandwidth is important to you, rather than volume of locations or addresses then they’re probably the best option. The charges are based on time and number of addresses, the majority of their plans come with unlimited bandwidth so you don’t have to worry about extra charges. They have the full range of modern proxy services from backconnect proxies supporting proxy rotation. Their IP quality is excellent too partly because they’re carefully controlled. They have lots of datacenter proxies which also are available with unlimited bandwidth plans but these are more common.

Smartproxy Updates Their Residential Proxy Network

Since this article was first written, Smartproxy have updated their service significantly. As one of the few reliable sources of residential proxies they’re worth considering. Especially if you need IP addresses in specific locations.

There’s lot to like about the new setup and their pricing strategies, here’s a few of their key selling points.

Freedom Across Proxy Pool

When you’re using proxies for mass browsing based tasks like web scraping you’ll need diversity and volume. Smartproxy doesn’t charge per proxy but give you access to the whole pool. For bots and scraping tools this is essential as you can rotate quickly and avoid concurrent requests from the same proxy to specific platforms. It also means you can use automated tools to scrape from lots of different locations at the same time.

Geo-Targeting Proxy Service Options to Access Data

Only the very largest proxy providers allow you to geo-target residential proxy addresses. This is simply because most don’t have the coverage or control over their residential IP addresses. Smartproxy are one of the few proxy providers with a large enough network with over 40 million residential IP addresses. This allows you to specify locations in over 195 locations globally including major US cities. So you can select a proxy with New York ip Addresses for example. These fresh proxies are vital for many tasks and allows control over geo-targeting blocks and filters.

Scaling Marketing Service

Often the key to being successful online is having the ability to scale a money making method or task. Without proxies this is simply not possible as you’ll be limited by each platform. The best example is being able to manage an army of social media accounts either to promote other resources or make money from directly. Using a decent residential proxy network is the only way to reliably do this, creating and managing multiple accounts through a network of residential IP addresses.