What is Proxy Server?
An intermediary server that forwards your internet requests to target websites and returns their responses, masking your real IP address and location in the process.
When you connect directly to a website, that site sees your own IP address, which reveals your rough location and your internet provider. A proxy server sits between the two: your request goes to the proxy, the proxy makes the request on your behalf, and the response travels back the same way. The destination only ever sees the proxy's IP.
That indirection is what makes proxies useful for anything done at scale. Instead of one machine hammering a site from a single address, requests can be spread across thousands of addresses in different networks and countries, which is how price monitoring, ad verification and market research operate without tripping rate limits.
Proxies differ mainly in where their IP addresses come from. Residential IPs belong to real home connections, datacenter IPs come from server hosting, and ISP IPs are hosted in a data centre but registered to a consumer provider. That origin, more than raw speed, determines how much a site trusts the traffic.
Related terms
Residential Proxy
A proxy that routes traffic through an IP address assigned by an ISP to a real home device, making requests appear to come from a genuine consumer.
Datacenter Proxy
A proxy hosted on cloud or server infrastructure rather than an ISP. It is the fastest and cheapest proxy type but the easiest for sites to detect.
ISP Proxy
A static proxy hosted in a data center but registered under a residential ISP, combining datacenter speed with residential trust and a zero fraud score. Also called a static residential proxy.
SOCKS5
A flexible proxy protocol that supports any traffic type, including UDP, and is often preferred for performance and security over HTTP proxies.