Residential Proxies Quick Start Guide

Oxylabs offers 100M+ residential proxies from all around the world. Our premium proxy pool is constantly growing and is able to deal with even the most demanding web scraping tasks. Perfect for collecting data from complex targets, it will help you achieve scraping free of CAPTCHAs or blocks.

Curious to learn all about our residential proxies? You’re in the right place. This quick start guide will provide all the information you need to get up and running. Let’s get started!

What you will get with Oxylabs® Residential Proxies

Market-leading proxy pool – we are always expanding our proxy pool to offer the best-in-class scraping experience.

Global coverage – from Jacksonville, Florida to Sydney, Australia, enjoy the widest possible range of locations. 

Exceptional performance – our engineers are hard at work so you could enjoy low response times and a consistently high success rate of up to 99.95%

Some of the fastest proxies – our residential proxies regularly score as the fastest on the market. But don’t take our word for it.

24/7 live support – get help from our proxy experts whenever you need it. Contact us via email at support@oxylabs.io.

Technical features

Universal location support – our residential proxies support all possible worldwide city-level locations. Simply specify the city via the city parameter (and add the country via the cc parameter) and you’re good to go. We also support US state and ASN-level targeting.

Sticky IP / sticky session support – the proxies also support sticky sessions of up to 10 minutes by default. You can get even longer sessions of up to 30 minutes (please contact support for this feature). See how to configure sticky sessions in the “Using Residential Proxies” section of this article.

Unlimited concurrent sessions – we do not limit the amount of concurrent connections so you could scale your operation to any size needed.

Dashboard – see your usage statistics, create and manage sub-users or whitelist IPs – do it all easily and in one place.

IP whitelisting – aside from the standard user:password authentication, you can also easily whitelist IPs.

Public API – use our API to integrate your residential proxies to any existing infrastructure via the Open API protocol. See the documentation for our Public API here.

Purchase and subscription information

Here you will find all the information in regards to purchasing any of our residential proxy plans and managing your subscription afterwards.

Pricing plans

There are eight monthly subscription pricing plans.

Regular plans available via self-service without KYC (Know Your Customer) process:

• Pay as you go – $15/GB

• Starter – $300, 25GB ($12/GB)

• Advanced – $600, 60GB ($10/GB)

• Premium – $800, 100GB ($8/GB)

Enterprise plans available via self-service after going through the KYC process:

• Venture – $1,750, 250GB ($7/GB)

• Business – $3,000, 500GB ($6/GB)

• Corporate – $4.000, 1TB ($4/GB)

Enterprise plan available via contacting sales:

• Custom+ – from $7.500, 2TB ($3.75/GB)

Pay as you go purchasing option is only available for Residential Proxies. Here's all the important information about this plan:

– Price – $15 per GB.

– Minimum amount per top-up – 1 GB.

– Maximum top-up amount per month – 50 GB.

– Non-refundable.

– You can upgrade to one of our subscription plans at any time, and all GBs will be transferred.

Our pricing is based on how much traffic you need on a monthly basis. Aside from this difference, all of the plans support the same features.

Please note that the included data does not roll over to the next month, and each plan has a minimum monthly commitment. You can find the details for each plan here.

Self-service

Our self-service (Fast Checkout) feature is available for four of our Residential Proxies plans – Pay as you go, Starter, Advanced, and Premium. These options become available after registering an account.

You will be able to use our Enterprise plans after passing the KYC verification process and creating your first user (see the “User creation guide”).

If you have purchased a Starter plan, you can add 5, 10, or 20GB of traffic. Advanced plan subscribers can top-up their traffic with 5, 10, 20, or 50GB. Premium plan subscribers can top-up their traffic with 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100GB.

If you would like to add more traffic than your initial plan (for example, you have a Starter plan but want to add 50GB), you need to contact our support team at support@oxylabs.io.

Please keep in mind that additional traffic does not transfer to the next billing period. 

Self-service plan change feature

With Residential Proxies self-service you can also upgrade your plan if you think the current one is not enough and wish to have more Residential Proxies traffic every month. Or you can downgrade a plan if you think that the current one is a little too big for you. You can find a detailed tutorial on how this works in our blog.

Contacting sales

For any larger plan please click the “Contact sales” button on our homepage. After filling out the inquiry form, one of our sales representatives will contact you with an email, asking for more details about your use case. 

Pro tip: the more information you will provide in these initial stages, the smoother and faster the purchasing process will be.

Managing your subscription

After successfully activating your subscription, you can manage it completely on your own via the dashboard. Simply go to My Account > Billing. Here you will see a quick overview of your active products and will be able to reach your invoices. Now let’s go further to Active Products > Manage subscription (see the screenshot for reference).

After clicking the “Manage subscription” button you will be taken to Cleverbridge, our payment vendor’s site, in which you’ll be able to see even more details including the options to toggle automatic renewal on/off and update your preferred payment option.

Using Residential Proxies

While you can enter specific proxy parameters manually, we highly recommend taking advantage of our Endpoint generator. With this tool, you can effortlessly retrieve a list of endpoints by choosing the parameters you need.

Using this connection mode you may choose a specific country, US state or city proxy via additional parameters in the username. This approach also supports session control. Below is a sample credentials structure with only the country and city parameters:

See the list of all the supported parameters and how to use them in our documentation here.

Other connection modes

We also offer a variety of other connection methods (gateways) that will allow you to use our residential proxy network with greater flexibility and efficiency: 

• The China entry node

• Randomizing entry points: general and country-specific 

• The country-specific sticky proxy entry point

You may find detailed information on how to use each one here.

Forming a query with country and city parameters

Let’s take a quick look at how a Shell (cURL) query that uses the cc (country) and city parameters might look like. In this example a query to ipinfo.io is performed from a random IP address from Munich, Germany:

curl -x pr.oxylabs.io:7777 -U "customer-USERNAME-cc-DE-city-munich:PASSWORD" https://ipinfo.io

In our documentation you may also find sample queries for Shell Python, PHP, Java, C# and Ruby languages.

Session control

For session control you simply need to add the sessid flag to your query. Here’s how it works:

1. Adding sessid means that the IP will not change with the following request

2. The system keeps the same IP associated with session ID as long as there is some activity.

3. After 60 seconds of inactivity, the IP is automatically changed to a different one.

4. If you stop sending requests or the IP address is no longer online, the system will assign a new proxy IP after 60 seconds.

5. Standard session time is 10 minutes.

For a practical example, see documentation.

Response codes

Oxylabs dashboard is the place to find everything you need to manage your Oxylabs services. In the case of residential proxies, this is where you’ll find these essential tools: usage statistics, user management and IP whitelisting. Continue reading to find out more about each one.

Statistics

The “Statistics” section allows you to see detailed information on how much traffic you use day-to-day. You can see usage graphs for any selected period and also filter by users or export this data to a .csv file. 

Under the “users” section you may create and manage users (sub-users). We offer features that allow you to set traffic limits (either monthly or lifetime). And you can also disable a user after it reaches its lifetime limit. Let’s have a quick walkthrough on how to create a new user.

First, click on the “New user” button in the top right corner.

Then, give your user a name and a password. If you wish to set a traffic limit, first tick the checkbox and then choose the limit and the time period.

You may disable users any time after their creation and also modify the limits by clicking the “Edit” button.

Whitelisting

Aside from the usual user:password authentication, we also offer IP whitelisting which allows you to access our residential proxy infrastructure simply by connecting via whitelisted IPs.

You may whitelist up to 10 IPs by default. Add or remove them as a simple text list via the “Edit whitelist” interface (see screenshot below).