How to Set Up Rotating Residential Proxies: Buy, Choose a Pool, Connect

Rotating residential proxies setup in six steps

Rotating residential proxies are sold by the gigabyte. You buy bandwidth once, generate as many proxy lines as you need, and every line draws from the same balance. Here is the full flow.

1. Add bandwidth. Create an account and buy a package from 5 GB for $4.50. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Alipay and crypto are accepted, and the bandwidth never expires.
2. Open the proxy generator in the dashboard.
3. Choose a pool (see below).
4. Pick a protocol. HTTP/HTTPS works everywhere and is the default. Choose SOCKS5 only if your tool asks for it.
5. Choose rotating or sticky. Rotating gives a fresh IP on almost every request, which suits scraping. Sticky keeps the same IP for a set time, from 1 minute up to 24 hours, which suits logins and multi-step flows.
6. Target a location. Choose a country, then optionally a state, city or ISP. Leave lower fields on Any to target the whole country. Then copy the connection string or save the line to My Proxies.

Which residential pool to choose

• Pool 1: clean IPs in 208 countries, with state, city and ASN targeting together, and sticky sessions up to 24 hours.
• Pool 2: cleaner IPs in 90+ countries, with sticky sessions up to 60 minutes. A city already includes its state, but an ISP cannot be combined with a state or city.
• Pool 3: fills gaps in smaller countries, Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia.
• Mix: both Pool 1 and Pool 2, with half the traffic on each.

Websites treat IPs differently, so test Pool 1 and Pool 2 against your own target. The Compare the pools option in the generator shows them side by side.

How the proxy connection string works

A proxy line has four parts: host, port, username and password. The host is gw.nefo.net and the port is 9000. All targeting lives in the username as -token-value pairs:

gw.nefo.net:9000
USERNAME-country-us-city-losangeles:PASSWORD

• -country-us sets the exit country.
• -city-losangeles sets the city.
• -session-<id> makes a sticky session that keeps one IP.

You do not have to type these by hand; the generator builds them. But because targeting is in the username, you can change the exit location later without going back to the dashboard.

Test your residential proxy

Before you plug the proxy into a scraper, check the exit IP from a terminal:

curl -x socks5h://USERNAME:[email protected]:9000 https://api.ipify.org

The address that comes back should be in the country you chose. If it is not, check that the -country-xx token is in the username; the gateway you connect through does not change the exit country. If the connection is refused right after you create the line, wait about a minute for the credentials to activate. If the proxy stops working later, you have most likely used up your bandwidth: top up and it resumes immediately.

Need code samples? See the Python Requests and Puppeteer integrations, and the API docs for creating lines programmatically.

Next steps

Compare options in rotating vs sticky proxies, or check pricing. When you are ready, open the proxy generator.

More tutorials

• Which proxy fits you? 2:58 min
• Mobile 4G/5G proxies: buy, connect and change IP 2:28 min
• Rotating mobile proxies: buy, set up and generate 2:52 min
• Rotating datacenter proxies: set up and check 1:24 min
• Long-term residential & mobile IPs: buy one IP and keep it 1:59 min
• Static IPs: one dedicated address that never changes 1:40 min
• Static residential ISP IPs: a home-provider IP that stays yours 1:35 min
• VPS and dedicated servers: choose and configure 1:08 min

Frequently asked questions