Gleb LepeshkinHead of Content Marketing
To set up a residential proxy, enter the provider’s endpoint (host, port, username, and password) into your app, browser, or system proxy settings. Most residential proxies use username:password authentication, where the username encodes the rotation, session, and geo-targeting options.
How to Set Up and Authenticate Residential Proxies
A residential proxy is delivered as four values: host, port, username, and password. You enter them wherever the connection is made — your browser extension, scraping framework, automation tool, or system network settings. The mechanics are the same across tools; only the input field changes.
Authentication comes in two forms. Username:password works from any network and is the default for residential proxies. The username string carries the routing controls — session type, sticky duration, and country or city targeting are passed as parameters directly in the username. For example, a username might look like user-country-us-session-abc123 depending on the provider’s format.
IP whitelisting ties access to your outgoing IP and requires no credentials in the request. It suits servers with a fixed address where you do not want credentials in plain text. Pick one method per connection; do not mix both on the same request.
With a rotating residential plan you connect to a single gateway endpoint, and the provider assigns a fresh peer IP per request. For a sticky session that holds one IP across multiple requests, pass the session parameter in the username. Verify the exit IP with a quick IP check before running real traffic — confirm both that the IP is active and that it is classified as residential, not datacenter.
For a fixed IP that stays the same across sessions, see static residential (ISP) proxies — those connect to one dedicated address rather than a rotating pool.