Residential proxy country targeting, plainly

Residential proxy country targeting means asking a provider for exit IPs in one country, region or city. ProxyPanda's residential line does not offer it: the pool picks the exit, and your usage log shows afterwards which country each request left from. When a job needs a chosen location, our ISP and datacenter proxies let you pick country, region and city.

We would rather you read that here than find it out from your log after topping up. The rest of this page covers what country targeting is, how to tell whether your job needs it at all, which of our lines to use when it does, and the questions to ask any provider that sells residential exits by the city.

What residential proxy country targeting means

A residential pool is a large set of household connections. Country targeting filters that set: you ask for, say, exits in Germany, and the gateway only hands you German addresses. Region and city targeting narrow it further. Providers that offer it usually take the choice as a parameter in the username or in a dashboard setting.

Two things decide whether it works well.

How many exits the provider has in that place. A country might have plenty. A small city might have a handful, and a handful of household connections come and go as routers restart and people close apps.
How the location was decided. A home IP carries no location tag. Its country and city come from geolocation databases, which are usually right about the country and much rougher about the city.

ProxyPanda's residential line has no country choice

To say it plainly: on our residential proxies you cannot choose the country, the region or the city. You choose between Randomize IP, a new exit per request, and Sticky IP, one exit held for a session. The pool decides where that exit is.

What you do get is a record. Every request is logged on its own line with the host, the country it left from, the status code and the byte count, and you can export the whole log as CSV. So you can see exactly where your traffic went, and check your bill while you are at it; checking your provider's meter shows how. You cannot ask for a place in advance.

The residential line sits at the budget end of the market, and this is one of the things it does not do. We would rather state the limit next to the price than leave it for you to discover.

Does your job need a country at all?

Often it does not. Residential proxies are usually bought to get past sites that turn away server addresses, and that problem has nothing to do with location. You probably do not need a chosen country when:

The content is the same everywhere. Documentation, forums, public APIs, many news and reference sites.
You pick the market in the URL. Country domains, a language path, or a country= style parameter often set the store you see, whatever your IP. Test it, though: some sites still redirect or change prices by address.
You want breadth, not a place. A research dataset or a catalogue crawl usually cares that requests are spread out and polite, not where they come from.

You can test this in a few minutes. The script below fetches one page through two static IPs in different countries, with the same headers, and compares the visible text. HOST_1, PORT_1, HOST_2 and PORT_2 stand for two ISP or datacenter IPs from your dashboard.

import difflib
import re

import requests

URL = "https://example.com/"
EXITS = {
    "country A": "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST_1:PORT_1",
    "country B": "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST_2:PORT_2",
}
HEADERS = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36",
    "Accept-Language": "en",
}


def visible_text(html):
    html = re.sub(r"(?is)<(script|style).*?</\1>", " ", html)
    return " ".join(re.sub(r"<[^>]+>", " ", html).split())


pages = {}
for label, proxy in EXITS.items():
    reply = requests.get(URL, proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, headers=HEADERS, timeout=30)
    pages[label] = visible_text(reply.text)
    print(label, reply.status_code, "ended at", reply.url)

first, second = pages.values()
print(f"Similarity: {difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, first, second).ratio():.0%}")

If both runs end at the same URL and the similarity is close to 100%, location does not change what this page shows, and the residential pool's choice of country will not hurt you. A different final URL means a redirect by country. A low score means localised content, and then you need a chosen location.

When you do need a country

Some jobs are about location by definition.

Localised prices and stock. Shops change prices, delivery options and availability by where a visitor seems to be. Price monitoring from the market you sell in needs an address in that market.
Rank checks. Search results differ by country and often by city. Rank tracking covers the setup, and checking Google rankings by country goes into detail.
Ads. Checking that an ad appears where you paid for it means looking from there; see ad verification.
App store listings. Availability, price and localised screenshots vary by storefront, and the storefront often follows the visitor's country.
Your own site's regional rules. Redirects, currency and consent banners, as a visitor abroad sees them; see geo checks.

For all of these, use our ISP or datacenter proxies. Both let you choose the country, region and city when you order, where the stock carries that detail, and ISP also lets you pick the internet provider. The order form lists what can be sold right now, so you see stock before you pay, and it shows the total before you confirm, including anything a region or city adds. The locations pages cover common markets such as the United States, Germany and Japan.

Which of the two? Datacenter when the target accepts server traffic; ISP when it screens hosting networks or when you need one address for weeks. ISP or datacenter proxies has the comparison. If you need many exits in one country, rent several static IPs there and cycle through them in your code.

And if your job needs rotating household exits in one particular city, we do not sell that. It is better to hear it from us before you spend anything.

What to ask a provider that sells per-city residential targeting

Plenty of providers offer residential exits by country, region or city. These questions apply to any of them, and a good provider will have short answers.

How many exits are there in that city now? The country figure tells you nothing about one town. Ask whether you can see the per-city count before you pay.
Where does the city come from? Which geolocation source, and is it checked against a second one? City data for home IPs is approximate everywhere.
What happens when the city runs dry? Does the request fail, wait, or quietly fall back to another city or the whole country? A silent fallback means your "city" data is partly from somewhere else.
Is the fallback or failure billed? If requests fail for lack of exits, are those bytes charged?
Can you check it afterwards? A per-request log with the exit location lets you confirm what you paid for.
What if it exited in the wrong place? Ask whether traffic spent on a wrong location is refunded.

Then check a sample yourself. Pull a few exit IPs, look each one up in two geolocation databases, and compare. Expect the country to match and the city to be close at best. How to check what kind of IP you were sold walks through the lookups, and checking IP quality covers what else to look at.

Checking the country on our lines

Residential: the usage log shows the country of each request. Export it and count, if the spread matters to you.
ISP and datacenter: look up the IP you were given. The country should match what you ordered. If it does not, that is ours to fix: the honesty page commits us to crediting back the traffic spent on a mislabelled IP and pulling it. It also says we offer city targeting only where we can verify the city.

Quick answers

Can I choose the country on ProxyPanda's residential proxies? No. The pool picks the exit, and the usage log shows the country of each request afterwards.

Which ProxyPanda proxies let me choose a country? ISP and datacenter. Both offer country, region and city where the stock carries that detail, and ISP adds a choice of internet provider.

Is city-level proxy targeting accurate? It is approximate for any provider, because it rests on geolocation databases. Treat a nearby city as normal and a different country as a fault.

Do I need residential proxies to see localised prices? Not always. Test a datacenter IP in that country first. If the shop turns servers away, try an ISP IP there before anything else.

Where to start

Work out whether your job needs a place at all with the comparison script above. If it does not, residential or datacenter will do, whichever your target accepts. If it does, rent one ISP or datacenter IP in the country you need and check what the page shows. Rates are on the pricing page, and if you are unsure which line fits, describe the job in Discord before you top up.

Learn

Use cases

Locations

Residential proxy country targeting: what we offer, and what to ask