What are Rotating Proxies and How do Businesses Use Them?

Photo of author

(Newswire.net — August 28, 2020) — When you get standard proxy IPs from your provider, the IP they give you is fixed. That means the proxy server will use one proxy IP to conceal your real IP over a long time. If you visit the same website several times within a short period, the site will notice your proxy’s IP.

Continued requests into the site could then get your proxy blocked, which then beats the purpose of having a proxy in the first place.

Rotating proxies are a type of residential proxies designed to overcome this challenge. They are making it harder for websites to identify your proxies by changing the IP addresses often.

Some insight into residential proxies

When an internet service provider supplies you with an internet connection, you are allocated an IP address. This is your computer’s digital identification when you’re browsing.

When a proxy provider gives you a proxy whose IP is from an ISP, that is referred to as a residential proxy. It is harder for websites to detect and block residential proxies, which makes them safer and more reliable when you need to browse anonymously and safely.

If your business is involved in data mining and web crawling, residential proxies are a preferred choice.

There are two types of residential proxies – static and rotating residential proxies.

With static residential proxies, your browser uses the same proxy IP address for an extended time. Your proxy provider may offer you a replacement if some of the IPs they provided are blocked by the sites you want to access.

Rotating residential proxies

Rotating proxies are also known as back-connect proxies. With rotating proxies, the IP address used to mask your computer’s real IP changes often depending on the settings. Some are designed to change after a certain period. For most proxy providers, you can choose an interval between 5 minutes and 2 hours.

You can also set it such that proxy rotating occurs every time you open your browser or whenever you refresh it.

To do the rotation manually, you will need a proxy rotator. The proxy supplier will then give you your pool of proxies that will be rotating at the set interval.

Manual rotation, however, can be quite challenging. This is especially the case for businesses that manage social media accounts and access several websites quickly and repeatedly.

Also, you can easily make a mistake when setting the rotation system. The result of such errors is that you end up using a small pool section of proxies repeatedly. Websites then identify and block your proxies with much ease.

To avoid this, you can get rotation services from your proxy service provider. You will be allocated a pool of proxy IPs. You can tell them to select the pool for a specific location if that’s a crucial detail for you.

After that, you don’t have to worry about your proxies since the proxy server will be rotating them regularly.

But you have to be extremely careful when choosing a proxy provider. With the popularity of rotating proxies on the rise, some hackers have set up entities posing as proxy providers. In reality, the rotating proxy IPs are used to create botnets. The hackers then access your system and steal data.

You should, therefore, be careful and use only reputable proxy service providers.

How does having rotating proxy services benefit your business?

Business websites need to access other sites continuously, whether it’s for data mining, web crawling, or just market research.

Unfortunately, when a website notes that there are too many queries coming from your browser, their systems mark your IP address for suspected bot activity. If the systems note continued attempts to access the site, they block your IP address altogether.

If you were to use static proxies in such situations, they would keep getting blocked so often. If several websites keep restricting your access, the data you collect will then be erroneous and unreliable.

Some sites may even feed you wrong information if they think that your traffic is coming from a bot.

With rotating residential proxies, you can set such that every access to the website is with a unique IP address.

This deceives the website’s systems to register each visit as being from a different browser. Your visits, therefore, don’t raise suspicions of being bots and thus unlikely to be denied further access.

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 particularly 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.

Proxy rotating makes 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.