Having multiple IP addresses at your disposal is better than routing the connection through just only one. But there’s little use for a large IP pool if you don’t know how to use them correctly. Learning how and what types to Rotate Proxies is the first thing you must master.
It might seem that providers have already made this easy for customers. Their dashboards can already achieve IP rotation. Unfortunately, this isn’t the most efficient way to rotate proxies. Depending on your task, you’ll need to learn how to set up automatic rotation yourself. This article will give you the basics.
The benefits of proxy rotation
A rotation proxy can be defined as a pool of intermediary IP addresses that route your connection in turns according to set criteria. Unlike an ordinary proxy, no one device acts as an intermediary. Instead, the devices and IP addresses are rotated for every set task, period, action, or other parameter.
Improved anonymity. When you connect to a website with a proxy, it conceals your original IP address, which makes it more difficult to track your online activity. However, the website can still log your activity by tracking the proxy IP address. You might use a different proxy in a later session, but your actions can still be logged.
Rotating proxies is a step further in ensuring anonymity. If your IP address changes every half an hour, the website can only log your actions during that time. More advanced settings can be specified for specific, which makes even the least legitimate IPs hide your identity better.
Better data access. Websites impose numerous restrictions on accessing data. It’s not just the usual geo-restrictions, which are based on your IP allocation. Some websites simply limit the data that one IP address can access or download. If one IP address sends more than a set number of requests, it will get restricted.
Overcoming such obstacles is crucial for web scraping projects, where one bot must collect large amounts of data quickly. Rotating proxies ensures that data can be accessed fully, irregardless of location or IP request restrictions.
There are many other benefits of rotating proxies, such as security, performance, and better affordability. However, these benefits highly depend on what proxy type you’ll be rotating.
Proxy types and IP rotation
Due to economic and performance reasons, datacenter proxies are the most popular choice when compiling a rotating proxy pool. These proxies are created by running virtual machines on powerful servers in data centers. One server can house hundreds of virtual machines, each with a new IP address.
Such servers are extremely powerful, and there’s little, if any, effect on performance when the IP addresses are rotated. It’s beneficial to rotate datacenter IPs since they might be easily detected by websites otherwise. Furthermore, such IP addresses are quite cheap, so it’s easy to purchase them in large quantities just for rotating.
Residential proxies have fewer benefits when rotated. These proxies are run on physical devices in ordinary homes with an internet connection verified by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). In most cases, providers rotate residential proxies to reduce the costs of maintaining such IPs.
Each IP must have a household agreeing to share their internet connection, which isn’t cheap but highly anonymous. Therefore, such proxies are best for tasks when you only need one highly legitimate IP address.
Rotating residential proxies might defeat the purpose as they lose performance while the risk of detection isn’t so high. However, the equation changes if you can get hold of very cheap rotating residential proxies. Using longer sticky sessions and setting up your own rotation is a game changer for both simple anonymous browsing and more advanced tasks, such as web scraping or automation.
Three ways to rotate your proxy IPs
Browser Extensions
If your main use of proxies is anonymous browsing, then setting up a browser extension is the best way to rotate proxies. Integrating proxies into a browser without a specialized extension is problematic because most browsers do not have enough advanced settings.
Using an add-on such as Proxy Switcher and Manager or SwitchyOmega you can set up different proxy profiles and even assign different proxies to different browser tabs. Some extensions even allow you to write simple PAC scripts to automate more precisely when the proxy IP address needs to be changed.
Rotation control by the provider
While looking for proxy extensions, you are sure to stubble upon proxy addons created by providers. These usually just mirror the settings you can find on the provider’s dashboard, which adds some convenience, but it’s still a limited choice for at least two reasons.
A Proxy rotator from one provider might have limited support for a proxy from another. It gets difficult to add and manage a large pool of proxies from different providers when your extension prioritizes one sort of proxies. Another reason is that rotation from providers is usually based only on time stamps, so you won’t be able to add scripts or other more advanced options.
Other software to rotate proxies
Web scrapers, anti-detect browsers, social media management software, and most other tools using proxies can rotate them for you. It might be more difficult if you use a custom tool, but if you can code something like a Python scraper, adding proxy rotation won’t be that difficult.
Even if your program doesn’t have proxy support integrated, you can use a tool to route traffic through a proxy. Tools like Proxifier can help you route traffic to any program on your device through a proxy server. You can also set specific proxy rules to create a needed IP rotation.
Wrapping up
I hope that proxy rotation doesn’t appear so complicated now. Of course, the technical details of rotating proxies with certain software in Phyton code might be advanced. But if your use case is simpler, I recommend grabbing a pool of cheap residential proxies and rotating them with a browser extension.
