Why is Everyone Using Rotating Residential Proxies Online ?
Once upon a time, proxy servers where relatively straight forward things. Indeed there was only one basic type and their effectiveness mainly relied how well they were set up. Mostly they existed in the commercial and education world as a portal or gateway to important applications or the outside world. Certainly no-one outside IT departments had any real use or interest in them although their importance slowly grew as the internet became more important.
These dedicated proxy network systems were more commonly referred to as application or web gateways sat in server rooms or a data center- which is essentially what they were. A focal point for controlling access to either the World Wide Web or some important application servers. However there were signs of how important rotating proxies would become as they were increasingly installed as essential components in other software. Unfortunately as this practice spread it would often lead to serious security problems as they became unnoticed gateways into otherwise secure networks.
This was actually quite a common occurrence in earlier online times – some program or application would install a component like IIS (Internet Information Services). The administrator often had no knowledge that they’d just turned that application server into a fully functioning proxy.
It’d likely sit there until someone noticed the bandwidth costs or that they where hosting a best use cases something like a Warez FTP server for half of Eastern Europe!
Today, people have begun to realise the possibilities of routing traffic through proxy servers.
The key factor is that by using standard or rotating proxies anyone can create, control and operate multiple identities through a single internet connection. Indeed a carefully configured residential proxy effectively gives anyone a huge online advantage to extend their reach around the world.
They have a myriad of uses and people use them for marketing, promotion on social media, market research or ensuring brand protection around the world too. Indeed many advertising and marketing companies even have proxies dedicated to specific tasks.
Proxies really can be the key to unlocking Internet Fortunes !
The use of these servers have changed greatly with the expanse of the internet, proxies now have all sorts of legitimate uses too. They are no longer simply a basic way of hiding your identity online. Both the requirements of users and the detection abilities of firewalls, web servers and intrusion detection systems mean that there is an increasing demand for all sorts of specialised and high performance proxies. Also for something called a rotating proxy which doesn’t have one or two fixed IP addresses. Indeed these rotating proxy networks are probably among the most widely used commercially.
A proxy network can be based in any location, although most are usually hosted in something called a data center. The variety though extends to all different types including various methods of proxy rotation which allow unlimited bandwidth and access to rotating residential IPs.
The best proxy can be an important tool used to make serious money online if you know what you’re doing.
Here’s some of the different types of proxies you’ll find –
- Datacenter Proxies – servers housed in datacenters with commercial IPs.
- Shared Proxies – servers shared between multiple users and connections.
- Backconnect Proxy – standard proxy linked to IP address pool.
- Residential Proxies – servers with IP addresses registered for home use.
- Rotating Proxies – form of backconnect proxies which rotate through pools of specific addresses automatically. Normally used with rotating residential Ips to minimize costs.
- Private Proxies – reserved for individual use (often very expensive)
- Dedicated Proxies – servers for specific users or uses e.g. Instagram marketing, Search analytics etc. Can also be proxies rotating through different addresses.
That’s only a few of the common definitions you’ll find plus there are lots of combinations and variations of the above! Indeed one of the groups we’re looking at now are the combination of two of these proxy server types – so let’s just look at how to make rotating residential proxies.
A Tale of Rotating Residential Proxies
First lets expand on the most important part of this classification – the residential part. This refers to the type of IP address that is assigned to the proxy server. A residential proxy will have been assigned residential ips (network addresses) which will be used when forwarding requests.
The reason is that any request from a residential address is normally highly trusted because it is assumed to come directly from a home user. These sorts of addresses are only allocated via Internet service providers (ISPs) to home users when they sign up for some sort of broadband or internet connection. No commercial entities should have access to these addresses at all. If anyone needs to mirror or mimic real user behaviour for something like ad verification or web scraping online they need to use a residential IP address.
Let’s take a simple example – say you’re setting up a website which finds the best deals in airplane flights. Obviously the most important component of this is to obtain accurate web prices for the flights to display on your site. Perhaps the flight companies are rather reluctant to supply the prices directly to commercial providers, so if you try and grab these prices from their website directly they are going to probably block access to your servers (and your web scraping requests).
The trick in this instance is to assign a proxy to access these resources using residential IP addresses. Then all the requests routed through these residential proxies will seemingly originate from ordinary home users who are checking for flights from home. Your website can then discretely look up flight times and prices then use them as data on your own site. Perhaps even to earn commission payments from the flight companies who supplied the data in the first place.
Now obviously if all these requests came from the exact same residential IP address then that would look rather suspicious, so you’re going to need a lot of them! A rotating residential proxy is essential to service any significant number of requests. This can be difficult as although you can buy residential IPs they tend to be very expensive. For high traffic websites then you could potentially need almost unlimited residential proxies which will cost a fortune !
How to Get Residential Proxies without Spending a Fortune
For most purposes the solution is to simply share. Most people just need to hide individual requests and there’s often no real need to own exclusive access to these proxies or addresses. In our flight scraping example, the key requirement is that each request is routed through an individual residential IP address. It doesn’t really matter if someone else is using that address to post to Instagram or perform SEO tasks or some other purpose! Rotating proxies which share addresses make this possible.
Which means that it is possible for companies like RotatingProxies to provide access to lots of rotating residential IP addresses without costing a fortune. Their proxies will control and rotate the IP addresses through individual connections. To access and rotate through these addresses our flight website would just route all the traffic through a single proxy address. The same would apply if you’re using a browser or posting through a single computer – just route through a single residential proxy which rotates through individual IP addresses.
It’s the same sort of concept for people marketing and promoting multiple social media accounts. Without access to lots of proxies residential and commercial we’d be limited to a single account! It’s almost impossible for anyone managing these or conduction market research to operate in that way.
It’s an innovative and ideal solution for many people who work online. Anyone can effectively operate as a host of residential users simply by using residential rotating proxies. If you try to constantly query a specific service or site like this on any sort of scale without using such proxies you’re going to simply look like a Bot and get blocked. The exact same thing will happen to any form of repeated request for example to Google to check adverts or rankings. In fact most online activities on any sort of scale will probably need to buy residential proxies in order to operate effectively.
Remember Residential Proxies Allow you to Control Multiple Digital Identities
This is a simple overview of how rotating residential proxies are used, however there are further complications depending on the what you’re trying to achieve to which is the best proxy for your needs.
If you’re looking for providers of quality, secure and cheap residential proxies then this company are well worth checking out – RotatingProxies
For larger and higher profile projects where you need a residential proxy on a bigger scale then there’s really only one option – the world’s leading commercial proxy network provider – Luminati – they are more expensive though. They have an extensive range of rotating proxies and you can choose either residential proxy or datacenter ones. They’ll put the world’s largest network of rotating residential IPs at your fingertips though.
