Everything To Know About IP Rotation In 2022

If you are familiar with proxies, you should know that a proxy plan can contain multiple IPs. The reason for acquiring such a one is to send numerous requests to your target websites from various IPs.

However, having many addresses would be futile if you consistently send requests either from the same address or a small number of them. That’s because website servers let on a confined number of requests from one address within a particular time frame. Hence, once you exceed this maximum, the server will block your address and the connection will break off.

What to do in this case? First, read through our article about IP rotating and you will get the solution.

What is IP Rotation?

This is a process that haphazardly changes your IP address with another one. It can be done upon a connection request, after a particular period of time, or it can be subject to other conditions. Let’s say, if you sign up with an ISP (Internet Service Provider), you get assigned a dynamic or a static address. The latter IPs don’t change, whereas dynamic ones rotate consistently.

As a rule, most providers suggest dynamic IPs because they embrace a limited number of IPs to work with. When you connect to the internet, the provider assigns you an address out of a pool of unemployed addresses; after some time, it gets back to the pool, and you receive a new address. However, in this case, rotating IP isn’t actually predictable. Therefore, if you deal with automation purposes and web scraping, we will disclose some other more reliable ways to rotate IP.

To ensure that IPs are not freely recognized by web servers, a rotating proxy rotates various IPs out of a proxy pool. This way, you can know for certain that all your IPs are used uniformly, thus decreasing the likelihood of getting banned by the server of your target website.

Rotating IP addresses after a definite period of time will prevent your IPs from being recognized and marked as suspicious. Based on what your rotating proxy provides, you will be able to access any website from various addresses or even various locations. Whether you crawl websites to extract important data or you need to intermittently rotate IPs for your clients, a decent IP rotation proxy is a must. A rotator will disguise your address by haphazardly rotating IPs in particular time intervals.

IP Rotating Use Cases

Detecting bot-like activities on any website starts with checking a user’s address. Hence, if you deal with scraping data and don’t use IP address rotation, there is a high risk that you will be restricted or blacklisted due to too many connection requests from the same address.

Another thing everyone gets annoyed with is regularly appearing CAPTCHAs. Actually, they were designed and domains use them precisely to avert bots’ unauthorized access. CAPTCHAs can make the web scraping and data collecting process come to a halt and simply fail. Rotating IPs is the best way to bypass CAPTCHAs.

Random IP address proxy rotation enhances security and anonymity. If you want to increase success rates, data scraping operations and web crawling procedures would be impracticable without proxy rotation. To prevent blocks and bypass anti-scraping measures, IP rotation can imitate the behavior of numerous organic users.

SEO specialists resort to random IPs’ rotation proxies to check keyword rankings from diverse locations and to promote particular content on multiple social media accounts. For example, with a Canada proxy or random German address, you can research keyword rankings in that country. Data intelligence companies, on the other hand, use it to scrape websites for performance and analytics purposes.

Ways to Rotate IP

Apply a VPN

This is the first way to rotate your address. Although VPNs are suitable for disguising an address and accessing content with geographical restrictions, when it comes to automated tasks, there might be some issues.

For example, in case you need to extract data from multiple pages of the same website and not get blocked, you will need numerous different IPs. Several VPN service providers enable customers to set up scheduled IP address rotation every few minutes. But, they provide you with only one address at a time, making the web scraping operations very slow. Moreover, even though VPNs change your address and location, they don’t conceal the fact of using a VPN as such, which may put a huge target on your back.

Apply a Proxy Server

This is another way to rotate IP. When it comes to scraping, proxy servers are extremely efficient as you can run multiple connections at once, all using various IPs. Plus, you can select IPs from diverse locations worldwide to bypass geo-restrictions. However, we do not recommend proxies available on free online lists as they are not reliable, might inject ads, and mess with your data.

Methods Used for Rotating IP Addresses

Internet Service Providers carry out IP rotation using the following various methods:

• Pre-configured rotating IPs. This technique implies that rotation is pre-configured to happen at particular intervals. Once the time scheduled elapses, the consumer is assigned a new address.

• Specific IP rotating. The customer may select which address to apply for a particular outgoing connection.

• Random IP rotation service. This technique assigns a haphazardly rotating address to every new outgoing connection. The consumer does not control which address gets assigned.

• Burst rotating IP. The Internet Service Provider assigns new addresses after a scheduled number of connections. Let’s say, if the defined number is 10, a new address will be assigned to the eleventh connection once every 10 connections are commenced.

Furthermore, you can perform proxy rotation manually. For example, you can configure the proxy settings in Chrome, although some users prefer resorting to various proxy managers to help them set up and change random IP address proxy.

If you feel tech-savvy or have some technical skills to get the code running accurately, you can carry out proxy rotation programmatically via tools like the Python Requests library.

Alternatively, you can resort to any automated proxy rotating tool that will automatically randomize IP.

Applying a dedicated proxy rotating service will reduce the risk of inaccurately configuring the IP rotation process, which is fraught with the overuse of particular proxies and result in bans.

With data center proxies, on the other hand, a proxy rotator can be of great help in this process. If you need to rotate your address continuously, a random IP address changer will be the perfect solution.

However, remember that many residential proxies out there are self-rotating and do not require a proxy rotator at all.  

And one more thing: using proxies from most providers might require a tech person, who will accurately configure the proxy server, automate rotating IP addresses, and keep an eye on the entire procedure.

Setting Up IP Rotation with Proxies

Choose IP Rotation Software

If you don’t have a technical or programming background, we recommend using IP rotation software, which is especially useful if you have got a list of proxies. You can choose between software like Elite Proxy Switcher or other projects such as Mubeng on GitHub. Essentially, the rotator automatically selects random IPs and changes them to different ones per every request.

Keep in mind that even though IP rotation software is a foolproof solution for scraping simple websites, it still can significantly slow down the operations of your web scraper. Plus, it might feel disjointed or restricting, especially to those who prefer writing their own web scraping scripts. That is why software of this kind suits best to medium-sized projects.

Set Up Rotating IPs

Based on your programming and technical skills, another alternative is to manage rotating IP addresses by writing code yourself.

Feel free to research diverse instructions online to help you set it up. On the list of the most commonly used programming languages are Python (Scrapy, Beautiful Soup), PHP (Symfony, Laravel), and Node JS (Puppeteer, Cheerio,).

If you don’t feel you are good at programming yet still would like to learn, we recommend Python as the best option for such cases. You can opt for using Requests and Beautiful Soup libraries or resort to a web crawling framework such as Scrapy. The latter solution is more feature-complete but, at the same time, it is more complicated.

Setting up and managing IP rotating on your own can be challenging. It is even more so in cases where you would like the rotation logic to be solid for it could enable freshly used IPs to cool down before getting back to the roster.

Buy an IP Rotation Service

Rotating proxies automatically change your address with a different one per each connection request. This way, you will never hit the limit, thus your web scraping project operations will be able to run uninterrupted. Consider running a script to send 7,000 requests to as many target websites as you wish and get 7,000 various IPs!

Multiple providers in the industry offer rotating proxies that provide you with access to a pool of addresses. Some companies maintain more than 100 million diverse IPs on a monthly basis.

Depending on how rotating proxies work, they typically do not provide you with a list of IPs. Instead, they apply a backconnect gateway server that automatically assigns you new IPs, so you don’t bother to import massive proxy lists. If the provider you chose allows it, you can filter rotating proxies by various features like city, country, or ASN. Yet, the best part is the absolute easiness of setting them up.

However, there is one drawback you should be aware of concerning IP rotation service. You will have less control over the history and archive of your address usage. This shouldn’t be a problem since providers usually offer huge address pools that are much harder to blacklist compared to limited-scale proxy lists.

How to Carry Out IP Rotation

So, if you made the decision and have already obtained some private proxies, follow these simple steps to set up the IP rotation proxy on your computer.

• Ensure that chosen proxies are reliable

As with any other service, proxies can differ from provider to provider. Before proceeding to the next steps, we recommend checking whether each of your proxies is secure and reliable.

• Break down proxies into groups

Decide on the number of proxies you wish to apply per rotation. Let’s assume you have got 100 reliable proxies, so break them down into 10 groups of 10 addresses. The efficiency of your browsing operations will depend on how many proxies and groups you use: the more – the better, obviously.

• Rotate groups

After a while, you expect the IPs from the first group to get somewhat ‘overused’, meaning that your target website servers have most likely started recognizing them as suspicious. To avoid this, switch to the next group of proxies and easily proceed with your browsing.

FAQ

Wrapping Up

So, now, you’ve got to know all credentials about IP rotation and why you might need a first-rate proxy in that regard. Whether for crawling the websites of your competitors, extracting critical information for your business, or managing particular proxies of your clients, acquiring a business-class proxy service plan to rely on is of sheer significance for your company.