> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.zenrows.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Introduction to Residential Proxies (Legacy)

> Overview of Zenrows Residential Proxies featuring 55M+ rotating IPs across 190+ countries, geo-targeting, and 99.9% uptime for scraping.

Zenrows provides an extensive residential proxy service that includes a pool of over 55 million residential IPs from more than 190 countries. Our premium residential proxies deliver 99.9% uptime and an average response time of 0.35 seconds, ensuring reliable and efficient connections.

**With features like IP auto-rotation and flexible geo-targeting, Zenrows Residential Proxies help you avoid rate limits and bypass geo-restrictions on a large scale.**

## Key Applications

Proxies are critical for web scraping and data extraction, but their applications extend beyond just avoiding IP blocks. Below are the primary benefits of using residential proxies for data extraction:

* **Bypassing Anti-Bot Systems:** Many websites deploy anti-bot mechanisms to block suspicious IP addresses. Proxies allow you to rotate IP addresses with every request, making your scraping operations undetectable. However, it's important to note that only premium rotating proxies can effectively handle sophisticated anti-bot systems. Free proxies or manual switching will provide a different level of protection.

* **Geolocation Targeting:** Some websites restrict access based on your geographic location. With residential proxies, you gain access to IP addresses from precise regions worldwide, allowing you to retrieve localized data and avoid geo-restrictions.

* **Boosted Performance:** Residential proxies enhance your scraping performance by enabling you to send more requests while minimizing errors, blocks, and timeouts. The result is a higher success rate, leading to more efficient data extraction.

* **Maintaining Anonymity:** Proxies conceal information about your device and identity, ensuring that your web scraping activities remain anonymous and secure.

## Residential Proxies vs. Premium Proxy

It's easy to confuse this product with the Premium Proxy feature in Zenrows' [Fetch](/fetch/features/premium-proxy) (formerly, Universal Scraper API), since both use the same residential IPs. The difference is in what you get around them:

* **Residential Proxies** (this product) gives you direct, standalone access to the residential IP pool. It's purely the proxy, meant for anonymity and IP rotation. There's no anti-bot toolkit, JavaScript rendering, or CAPTCHA handling bundled in, so you connect it to your own scraping stack and control the rest.
* **Premium Proxy** is a parameter (`premium_proxy=true`) inside Fetch. Every API request already goes through a proxy, a datacenter IP by default, and this parameter swaps it for a residential IP for that request, combined with the API's other anti-bot features.

<Tip>
  If you want the residential IP on its own, use Residential Proxies. If you want residential IPs plus built-in anti-bot handling in one API call, use Fetch with `premium_proxy=true`. See the [FAQ](/legacy/residential-proxies/faq) for a more detailed comparison.
</Tip>

## Parameter Overview

When using Zenrows Residential Proxies, you can customize your scraping requests with the following parameters to enhance control over proxy usage, geolocation targeting, and response behavior:

| PARAMETER                                                                                   | TYPE     | DEFAULT  | DESCRIPTION                                                                                                                        |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------- | -------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **username** `required`                                                                     | `string` |          | Your unique username for authentication                                                                                            |
| **password** `required`                                                                     | `string` |          | Your password                                                                                                                      |
| [**region**](https://docs.zenrows.com/legacy/residential-proxies/features/world-region)     | `string` | `global` | Focus your scraping on a specific geographic region (e.g., `region-eu` for Europe). **When set to global, no parameter is needed** |
| [**country**](https://docs.zenrows.com/legacy/residential-proxies/features/country)         | `string` |          | Target a specific country for geo-restricted data (e.g., `country-es` for Spain). Available only when not using `region`           |
| [**ttl**](https://docs.zenrows.com/legacy/residential-proxies/features/protocol-sticky-ttl) | `number` |          | Control how long the same IP address is used for your requests Minimum: 30, Maximum: 1 day.                                        |

## Pricing

Residential Proxies, used standalone, bill in credits: a flat **25,000 credits per GB** on every plan. The service charges per bandwidth used. For the full plan table and credit costs, see our [pricing page](/first-steps/pricing).