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What is a Residential IP?

Your home internet connection comes with an IP address that is assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). When this IP address comes from a consumer ISP and is tied to a household or personal connection, it’s known as a residential IP. 

This distinction between residential and other IPs matters. Websites and online services gather a lot of information from an IP address, including whether it belongs to a residential user or a commercial facility. (In IP terms, that’s called a datacenter.)

Residential IPs carry a certain level of legitimacy that datacenter IPs don’t, because they are ordinary people browsing from ordinary connections. As a result, some services, such as streaming platforms, restrict access based on location. They are more likely to flag or block traffic coming from a datacenter, as opposed to a residential IP. 

Some internet users choose to access the internet through a VPN that offers residential IP options. The tradeoff is that these services tend to cost more, and they offer fewer server locations than standard VPNs. 

If your IP address has ever been flagged or blocked by a website for no obvious reason, the type of IP behind your connection could be a factor worth investigating with an IP lookup tool.