What are Rotating Proxies?
When you utilize a rotating proxy, your requests are automatically “rotated” over multiple IP addresses. If you go this way, you won’t have to build or maintain your proxy rotation system. You can send requests to your proxy provider, which will use a different proxy for each one. Check that you are not using the same IP address to visit the target website since this may result in your IP being blocked.
What is a Rotating Proxy?
A rotating proxy is a proxy server that automatically assigns a new IP address for each of your connection requests. When you are about to send a request through a rotating proxy server, you can simply pass it through this proxy server. This rotating proxy server is responsible for configuring each of your requests with a new IP address from the proxy pool.
Do you have experience with working on a web scraping project and scraping information from the sites back to back? When you keep on collecting information from the sites, you will send requests multiple times to the same web server. This might result in IP blocks as the internet service providers (ISPs) will block your IP addresses because they consider them as spam or unwanted loads to their web server.
This is when a rotating proxy provides multiple IP addresses and helps each connection look like a unique one.
How does the Rotating Proxy work?
A rotating proxy server is available with multiple proxy addresses of different types in a pool. This rotating proxy will assign proxy addresses to the users based on the proxy rotation.
When a user sends a connection request to the web server, the rotating proxy that sits in between the user and the destination server will assign the next proxy available to the user, when another user makes a request or the same user sends another request, the rotating proxy will assign the user with the next available proxy in the rotation circle.
If the user completed their action with the proxy, the proxy servers will disconnect the proxy address from the user and make it available for proxy rotation again. It is also possible to set a time limit to rotate and switch to the other proxies. Using sticky session options, the users can stick to the same IP address until their work is done.
Benefits of Rotating Proxies
After learning how rotating proxies work and exploring their core functionalities, some benefits have probably already occurred to you. Let’s dive deeper into the advantages of these tools.
High level of anonymity
Every proxy server masks your IP address but may not provide complete anonymity. That’s not the case with rotating proxies because of the random IPs that they select for every connection. They pull multiple IPs from residential locations or data centers instead of choosing one from their server network.
This makes your online activity nearly impossible to track, keeping your sensitive data away from prying eyes. You can conduct business operations without worrying about unauthorized users intercepting your data transmissions.
Reliable web scraping
Businesses increasingly use rotating proxies for web scraping because they can make thousands of simultaneous HTTP requests to extract the necessary data. This would be impossible with other proxy servers because websites impose request limits per IP address.
Rotating your IP for every connection is perfect for bypassing geo-restrictions. It can help you to conduct market research, competitive analysis, software testing, and other operations.
IP block prevention
Along with limiting requests from a single IP address, websites employ anti-scraping measures to block web scrapers, such as CAPTCHA tests and honeypot traps.
A rotating proxy can bypass those mechanisms, preventing target websites from detecting your actual location and blocking the connection.
You can launch a script to extract multiple data points from a website without getting an IP block. The target website’s server will detect a new IP address for each HTTP request, thus approving them and sending a swift response.
Use Cases
- Data extraction: Web scraping data from websites that aim to block web scrapers using bot counter-measures (i.e. technologies to prevent bots from collecting their online data). Rotating proxies, especially the residential ones, make it less likely for you to be blocked out even by a target website with an aggressive blocking approach. You can continue to rotate proxies until you can extract all the data you need.
- Protecting your privacy online: The always-changing IP address ensures that no one can completely track your activity and protects you from cyberattacks.
- Changing locations enables changing your IP location to be able to access digital services that are available to users from a specific geo-location
What type of proxies can be rotated?
The two main types of proxies used for rotation are datacenter proxy and residential proxy.
- Uses a different datacenter proxy server for each connection request.
- Assigns an IP address from the data center in the proxy pool. These are not tied to any specific internet service provider but to the organization which owns the data center.
- Keeps its users anonymous by changing their IP addresses, however, all the IP addresses it assigns can be traced back to the organization owning the data center.
- Carries a risk of the target website banning all IPs originating from the concerned data center.
- Residential proxies have the benefit of assigning residential IPs for each connection request.
- Residential IPs are owned by internet service providers and are registered to a particular home address.
- Since residential IPs are verified and associated with a real person, they are less likely to get blocked out from target websites as compared to datacenter IPs.
- Ensures better access than datacenter proxy for web scraping and similar activities.
Rotating Proxies are Worth It?
Whether you want to use the more affordable data center rotating proxies or the pricier residential rotating proxies, it can seem quite expensive.
However, if you are using a proxy for any serious or ambitious projects, it’s almost irreplaceable. For one, if you’re running a web scraper or any other type of bot, a single IP will quickly get banned before you’ve executed a large number of requests.
When scraping the web, you are often making thousands, if not millions of requests in a short period. A few hundred, or even fewer, requests are already out of the ordinary, so you can get flagged before you’ve even made a dent in your target.
Residential rotating proxies are very expensive but can be worth their cost, particularly if the website is using a very aggressive anti-bot. More and more businesses with an online presence are clamping down on visitors bypassing their geo-blocking and anti-botting tools using standard VPNs or data center proxies.
Some, or all, of the IPs listed in the pool, might be known to the anti-botting solution, which could seriously impact your scraping tool’s effectiveness.
Using free proxy services are not recommended as they have a bad track record of abusing, or even selling user data, including financial information and website logins.
Conclusion
People make a great effort to be anonymous online. For personal users, anonymity is excellent for privacy and digital security. For your business, the stakes are even higher. We’ve all wished we had someone to chat with when we were feeling particular down and alone, check here for more information on the best chatting apps. Your firm may need to access so many websites and social media platforms either for data collection or to serve your clients.
Proxies do a great job of providing anonymity and privacy. However, websites also improve their systems to detect and block proxy-like activities.
Rotating proxies make sure that your proxy doesn’t access a website with the same IP too many times within a short period. This protects it from detection by security systems and makes your internet usage much more efficient.