How We Chose the Best Rotating Proxy Providers
We considered multiple general criteria, such as pricing and customer service. But we also looked for specific features to make sure the provider’s service is fit for scraping the web:
- Number of proxies – rotating proxies are often shared. If a provider has a large proxy pool, there’s less chance you’ll get proxies that have already been blocked.
- Rotation settings – a proxy can rotate every connection request, after 5, 10 minutes, or even an hour. We paid particular attention to providers with flexible rotation settings.
- Targeting options – it depends on your project, but being able to choose from many countries, cities, or ASNs really helps with location-sensitive tasks.
- Concurrent connections – the more parallel connection requests you can make, the faster you’ll scrape. Rotating proxies are best for high-volume scraping.
- HTTP(S) proxies – the SOCKS5 protocol is a plus, but you don’t need it for web scraping.
Rotating Datacenter Proxies vs Rotating Residential Proxies
Both datacenter proxies and residential proxies can rotate, but you shouldn’t use them for the same tasks. Here’s why.
Rotating Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxies, especially private proxies, are usually static. This means you get a list of IPs, and that’s it. But some providers offer the option to rotate them.
Such proxies have many virtues: they use fast connections that can reach 10 GBps speeds. They have 90%+ uptime, which ensures consistency. They’re also relatively inexpensive.
On the downside, datacenter proxies are relatively simple to detect. Once that happens, you can lose dozens or hundreds of IPs at once if your proxies use the same subnet (which is not rare). Finally, it’s hard to find providers that have datacenter proxies in many locations.
Considering this, you should use rotating datacenter proxies if you’re scraping unprotected websites or don’t need strict location targeting. They can work with protected websites as well. But with more power and less room for error, you’ll have to be much more careful than with rotating residential IPs.
Rotating Residential Proxies
Rotating residential proxies are slower, more expensive, and less stable than datacenter IPs. That’s because they rely on end users who might have a slow connection speed and can disconnect at any time.
On the upside, such proxies are much harder to detect. Unlike proxies from a data center, residential IPs rarely share a subnet. Their pools are much larger (up to millions of proxies) and include IPs from more locations.
That’s why, rotating residential proxies are often used with well-protected websites or when you need precise location targeting: to scrape flight companies, social media platforms, and sometimes search engines.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Rotating Proxies
What Are Rotating Proxies?
Rotating proxies are proxy IP addresses that change each connection request or after some time (for example, 10 minutes).
How Do Rotating Proxies Work?
A rotating proxy network gives you a backconnect IP address. It functions as a gateway to the provider’s proxy pool. The address automatically assigns you new IPs from the pool so you don’t have to do it yourself. Backconnect rotating proxies are much more convenient for web scraping than regular proxy lists.
When Should I Use a Rotating Proxy?
Rotating proxies are perfect for web scraping. They change your IP each connection request, you can scrape very quickly without getting blocked. You can also set up a sticky session that holds the same IP for 5-30 minutes. Then, general proxy use cases apply.
When should you try to use rotating proxies instead of lists? Great content, by the way!
Eman, rotating proxies are great when you need to make a lot of connection requests. So, for example, in web scraping. They simplify things a lot. Also, if you buy residential or mobile IPs, they’ll likely be rotating, whether you want it or not. That’s just the way they work.
cheapest rotating proxy that works well with google?
It depends on your experience and the number of requests you’ll be making. Crawlera is great for scraping Google due to its proxy management features; Smartproxy is among the cheaper resi providers to help you avoid blocks; Blazing SEO is very inexpensive in general, but it sells datacenter IPs.
Is it better to use sticky or rotating proxies, if the website is not really protected? I don’t get captchas or blocks.
For web scraping, rotating proxies are better because even weakly protected websites will start rate limiting you if you make too many requests from the same IP.