What is a Rotating Proxy and How to Use Them

Last updated on October 27th, 2023 at 03:44 pm

I’m beginning to think you can never have enough proxies, and I’m not the only one who thinks like that. When I first started using them to hide my IP address primarily, then a couple of proxies seemed liked all I’d ever need. However when you start working seriously online there’s literally hundreds of instance where proxies are not only desirable but almost essential to the task.

Remember all a proxy is essentially doing is making a request on your behalf. Yet of course this is an over simplification as it’s also hiding your real location, your identity and effectively bypassing any restrictions or throttles that might be in place. However to do this, you need enough proxies to keep switching your identity and location.

For the normal internet user then this is no real big deal and a single proxy with a couple of IP addresses in the right location is enough. Yet if you’re developing computer software, doing any sort of research or an internet marketer then you’ll probably need many, many more.

Why Use Proxies for Web Scraping?
There are two main benefits to using proxies for your web scraping project:

Hiding your source machine’s IP address
Getting past rate limits on the target site
The main benefit of proxies for web scraping is that you can hide your web scraping machine’s IP address. Since the target site you’re sending requests to sees the request coming in from the proxy machine’s IP address, it has no idea what your original scraping machine’s IP is.

When content isn’t available in your country.

Outside of web scraping, proxy servers are often used to get around geo-IP based content restrictions. If someone wants to watch an Australian TV program but they don’t have access from their home country, they can make the request for the show through a proxy server that’s located in Australia (and has an Australian IP address) to get past the restriction, since their traffic seems to be coming from the Australian IP address.

Besides masking your original IP address, another big benefit of using proxies with web scraping is getting past rate limits on your target site.

Many large sites have software in place to detect when there are a suspicious number of requests coming in from one IP address, since this usually indicates some sort of automated access – it could be scraping, or something security related like fuzzing.

The way this rate limiting software is usually setup, if too many requests come in from one IP address in a short amount of time, then the site will return some sort of error message to “block” future requests from that client for a pre-set period of time.

If you’re hoping to ingest more than a few thousand pages of content from a large target website, then you’ll likely run into rate limits at some point.

In order to get around this type of restriction, you can spread a large number of requests out evenly across a large number of proxy servers. Then the target site will only see a handful of requests coming from each individual proxy server’s IP address, meaning they’ll all stay under the rate limit while your scraping program is still able to ingest the data from many requests at once.

Source: https://blog.hartleybrody.com/web-scraping-proxies/

How to Use Rotating Proxies

As you can see, a few proxies won’t get you very far especially using any sort of automated software – often referred to as Bots or scrapers.

Which can be worrying if you’re facing the decision on what proxy to buy. Originally any proxy would normally only be loaded with a couple of network cards and perhaps a few IP addresses.  Clearly though this is not an efficient way to provide hundreds of IP addresses – having loads of servers and hardware sitting in datacentres merely acting as portals.  It makes the supply of large numbers of IP addresses hugely expensive which is why the current trend is to use rotating proxies.

The phrase however can be misleading as it’s not the proxy itself which is rotated but the IP addresses.  What happens is that instead of assigning a few static addresses to a proxy server and then switch between them – it works the other way around.   A single proxy is given access to a large pool of IP addresses which it rotates through when making external connections.

If you’re interested in how you can leverage this and actually obtain a huge amount of IP addresses, using a central proxy which you can simply plug into your browser or software then check out these guys – Rotating Proxies , they often have great bonus deals on too if you’re lucky.