What is Residential proxy?
A residential proxy routes traffic through real consumer devices on ISP connections, so the exit IP looks like an ordinary home user rather than a datacenter. They are sold by proxy networks (often sourcing IPs from SDKs or compromised devices) and are the hardest anonymizer category to detect.
Because the exit IP belongs to a genuine residential ISP, simple datacenter-ASN checks miss residential proxies entirely. Detection leans on threat-intel feeds, known proxy-backbone ranges, behavioral signals, and active probing.
Hosting-backed 'residential' proxies that actually run on cloud or colo IPs (Leaseweb, CoLoCrossing, and similar) are easier to flag because their ASN gives them away.
How IPLogs handles it
IPLogs flags hosting-backed residential-proxy backbones via datacenter-ASN classification and proxy feeds; truly peer-to-peer residential proxies remain an industry-wide hard problem.
Residential vs datacenter guide