The shed economy is fascinating actually. I found one operator on a Discord who was proud of his "farm." 94 TalkTalk routers in a converted barn in Shropshire. He had a spreadsheet with uptime per line, automated failover when BT did maintenance. Very professional crime.
I did not ask for a quote.
Following.
Member
In Poland the ISPs finally started caring. Orange PL now flags accounts with 50+ concurrent connections to VPN endpoints. My colleague got a letter asking "business purpose confirmation."
So the shed operators move to Romania, Bulgaria. Same EU latency, cheaper abuse desks.
Member
Total beginner question: is there ANY legitimate reason to want a residential IP? Like if I'm just hosting a game server for me and my mates?
Member
Your home IP works fine for that lad. "Residential IP VPS" is for people who want websites to think they're browsing from a sofa in Solihull, not a rack in Slough. Geo-fenced content, ad verification, sneaker bots, that lot.
Game server just needs port forwarding and a prayer to Virgin Media's DHCP gods.
This.
Member
Streaming geo-blocks. That's 90% of the market. Netflix, BBC iPlayer, the football rights. The other 10% is ad fraud and the last 1% is actual security research.
I self-host WireGuard on a €3 Hetzner instance. Route my traffic through that, nobody cares what ASN it has.
Has anyone actually tested detection rates? I ran my "residential" proxy from one of these shops through ipinfo.io and it flagged as "hosting" immediately. $15 down the drain.
ASN mismatch is the giveaway. Residential ASN ranges are public. You can't spoof ARIN/RIPE data, so these clowns just hope you don't check — https://bgp.tools
Real test: does ipqualityscore.com give it a "residential" fraud score under 30? None of the cheap ones pass. The ones that do cost more than a leased line.
Same here. Bought a "residential" IP for $12, IPQS score 78. Useless.
