Static vs Rotating Proxies: Which Is Best for You?

What are rotating proxies?

Unlike a static proxy which assigns one sticky IP, the rotating proxy provides you access to an entire pool of IP addresses. Rotating proxies interchange at either fixed or random intervals. For example, the IP address can change with every request you make, or every few minutes.

Best rotating proxies provide you with an additional level of security and anonymity as the requests you send to servers originate from different IP addresses, often from unrelatable geo-locations. 

Rotating proxies key features

• Automatic IP switching: Rotating proxy for scraping switches your IP address at regular intervals or per request, helping to mask your identity and reduce the risk of unwanted IP blocks and CAPTCHAs.

• Enhanced anonymity: By constantly changing IP addresses, a rotating IP makes it harder for target websites to track your activity or link requests back to a single source.

• Broad IP pool access: Gain entry to large pools of datacenter, mobile, or residential IP addresses, ensuring diverse geographic and network coverage for scraping, testing, and meeting diverse business requirements.

Proxy rotator

Do not confuse residential or datacenter rotating proxies with a proxy rotator. Proxy rotator is a software solution that rotates otherwise static proxies for you. The software assigns IP addresses automatically and enables you to choose cooldown times between IP changes. This tool is a useful addition to datacenter proxies. We have published a blog post that explains how to use the proxy rotator.

Static and rotating proxies compared

Static or rotating proxies for product information scraping

Big players in the e-commerce industry are well aware their competitors are going to scrape their websites. They are most likely doing it themselves, too. However, scraper bots can ruin the customer experience. They can generate a lot of traffic in a short time. This amount of traffic and requests sent to the server can slow down an e-commerce website or even bring it down.

As a result, many e-commerce websites implement anti-scraping technologies. These technologies enable servers to spot suspicious user behavior and request headers. Telling bots from users is easy today. Frequent requests and high quantity of requests from a single IP address is one of the main signs. This is where the sticky vs rotating proxies comparison becomes relevant.

Given the fact that you are performing a large scale scraping operation because the number of product pages is substantial, getting blocked is the most probable, if not imminent, scenario. 

To sum up, this particular use case requires either a large number of sticky proxies, or rotating proxies. Some targets require you to keep the same IP address for a specific time, and others may require a frequent proxy rotation. However, if you are not sure how likely you are to get blocked by the target website, or if you do not know how many static proxies you would need to gather the required information, then rotating proxies are a better choice.

A powerful alternative: Web Scraper API

For those who don’t want to deal with the complexities of managing proxies, there’s a simpler yet powerful way – implementing a ready-to-use scraping solution. For example, Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API is packed with features that go way beyond automatic proxy management. With custom parameters, JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA bypass, AI-driven fingerprinting, this scraper API takes care of every step of the web scraping process so that you could focus on driving insights and other strategic tasks.

Conclusion

You have learned the main differences between static and rotating proxies, and which one to choose if you are gathering product information from e-commerce sites.

If you are about to launch a large-scale web scraping project and are wondering whether to use static or rotating proxies, the answer depends on your target site. But if you do not have enough information about the target site, and how likely it is to block scraping, then choose rotating proxies.

Since you already know the difference between sticky vs rotating proxies, check out our blog to learn about ipv4 vs ipv6 or differences between residential and ISP proxies. And if you are interested in web scraping for e-commerce, check out different data gathering methods for this case. Lastly, take a look and consider trying our general-purpose web scraper for free. We have also published various guides to using our tools, like this guide to web scraping Etsy, so be sure to follow along and try out different scraping targets to get the most out of your free trial.