How Do Rotating Proxies Work?

Neal Bricker

Although many benefits come with rotating proxies, their use in web scraping holds the most weight.

Web scraping has numerous benefits to business owners. It makes it possible to understand the market and develop better strategies. By collecting publicly available data from the web, you can better understand your customers, monitor your competition, set better prices, improve your SEO, and generate more leads.

Proxies are essential in web scraping. They make it possible to scrape data without having your business’s IP blocked from the site. Using rotating proxies makes the process smoother.

How Rotating Proxies Work?

Proxies are intermediaries between you and web pages. You can use them to access websites anonymously. The proxy prevents any direct contact between your device and the website you are visiting.

Read: How Can I Best Protect My Home From Cyber Threats?

It makes web requests on your behalf as well as receiving the responses from web servers. Proxies come with an IP address attached to a different location.

There are two main types of proxies:

Data Center Proxies

Datacenter proxies are proxy servers issued by cloud server providers. They are artificially made and tend to have a similar appearance. They are also available in large numbers, which makes them suitable for rotation.

Residential Proxies

These are proxies that are issued by internet service providers to homeowners. They are legitimate and not easily detectable. Their low block-rate makes them quite reliable, especially when web scraping.

Using a single proxy for all your traffic increases your chances of getting blacklisted from sites when extracting data.

Rotating proxies makes it possible to split your traffic among different IP addresses. It provides IP rotation, where your device gets assigned with an IP address periodically. For this to work effectively, you need a large pool of proxies.

The size of your proxy pool will depend on:

• The number of requests you will be making. The more requests you make, the more proxies you will need. It prevents the overuse of some of the IPs.
• The level of security on the websites you visit. Sites with strong anti-bot detectors will require a bigger proxy pool. This is because the chances of having an IP block are high.
• The type of proxy you are using. Datacenter proxies are more detectable than residential proxies, and this means you will need more to cover those that get blocked.

Ensure that you are using private proxies instead of shared proxies. You get more control over the usage of a private proxy, making them less likely to be blocked.

Why You Need to Rotate Proxies?

Rotating proxies enhance the efficiency of your web scraping and price scraping projects for market and pricing intelligence. You get a pool of IPs that you can use to make your web requests. It gives the impression of several users and reduces your chances of being detected. This keeps your project going even when one IP gets blocked from the site.  

Rotating proxies give you access to IPs from different locations. You can use them to access blocked websites and go around geo-blocking. 

Using rotating proxies makes it possible to load traffic evenly on your business network. It enhances the speed of your connection, increasing employee productivity.

How You Can Rotate Proxies?

There are four ways you can rotate your proxies.

1) Software

You can use rotating proxy software to keep rotating your IPs as needed. All you need is to download and install the software and add the proxies you want to rotate. You also need to set the duration after which a rotation must be made. It will rotate the IPs from your pool automatically and ensure that IPs are not overused.

2) Extensions

Browser extensions are also available for use in rotating your proxies. Similar to how software works, you will need to download and install the extension.  Add your proxies and specify your preferred rotation interval. 

3) Backconnect

The backconnect method allows you to rotate your IPs without installing additional software or extension. It randomly assigns a different proxy to each request. You can either use a data center or residential proxies.

4)  Rotating Proxy Service

You can also contact your proxy service provider and request for the rotating service. They can allocate a proxy pool to you and configure your proxy server to automatically rotate your proxies without fail.

Winding Up

Rotating proxies are bound to make your scraping projects a success. They eliminate interruptions resulting from blocked websites and give you access to blocked websites.

You should notice that you need to work with the best proxies. Also, you need to ensure that you are getting your proxies and rotating proxy service from the same provider. They should be reliable and well-reviewed by other customers.