What they are
Residential proxy services sell access to the home addresses of ordinary people. A customer's traffic goes through a router, a computer or a phone in someone's home. Sometimes the owner of the device agreed to share their connection for money. Sometimes they do not even know there is a proxy on it, because it came bundled with a free app.
Payment is usually per gigabyte. A Minecraft login needs very little traffic, so thousands of connections from different home addresses are cheap.
Why they are hard to tell apart
The address belongs to an ordinary home or mobile provider. Nothing about it says proxy: the network is the same one your players use, and the country is plausible. A minute later the proxy hands out a different address, and this one goes back to its real owner, who may well play Minecraft too.
Who uses them
Mostly bot attacks: once data center proxies are closed, attackers switch to residential ones. Rule breakers dodging a ban use them as well, and so do players who create batches of alts for rewards.
How Kordon handles them
In Kordon residential proxies have their own address type, separate from VPNs and regular proxies.
- "Soft" and "Balanced" protection let them in, so that players on the same addresses are not hit.
- "Strict" protection refuses them. The "Custom" level has a separate switch for them. Blocking residential proxies is available from the Premium plan.
- During a bot attack residential proxies are refused on every protection level, even if your plan does not include blocking them.
Should you block them all the time
If your server is rarely attacked and rule breakers mostly come back through ordinary VPNs, "Balanced" protection is enough: during an attack residential proxies get closed anyway.
If bots and rule breakers arrive from home addresses every day, turn on "Strict" protection. Before you do, check the login log (from the Basic plan) and make sure your regular players will not fall under the block. Add anyone who still gets hit to the whitelist.