What actually matters in a residential proxy — and how we test it
Every residential-proxy vendor sells the same promise: clean IPs that look like real homes, not the flagged datacenter ranges that get you blocked. “100% ethically sourced.” “99% clean.” “Premium ISP.” The marketing is interchangeable, and at checkout you have no way to tell which of it is true — the IP arrives after you pay. What separates a proxy that holds up from one that fails isn’t the promise. It’s whether the address you receive behaves the way the label says, and keeps behaving that way while you use it. That part isn’t a claim. It resolves to a real network, carries a real reputation, and either matches the description or doesn’t. Some of that you can check in about two minutes with free tools, before you trust it with anything; the rest only shows once you put real traffic through it. ...