What is an IP address?

Before we get to IP rotation, let’s define what an IP address is. Just like physical addresses identify a place where letters, newspapers and goods are to be delivered, an IP address is a unique digital address of your computer. When you connect to the Internet via ISP (Internet Service Provider) an IP address is automatically assigned to your PC. When you visit a website, your computer identifies its IP (i.e. its location), so the website knows where to send the requested data to.
After defining you as an individual user, the website’s servers can only allow a limited number of requests from your IP address in a certain amount of time. This is done to prevent websites from spam attacks. If you exceed the number of allowed requests, your access to the targeted website will be denied. For businessmen, marketing analysts and SEO specialists such limitations cripple the business growth.

What is a proxy?

To support, develop, and scale your businesses, you will likely need to harvest a lot of data from a number of websites. Proxies can help you with that. A web proxy is a mediator between you and the web. When you use a proxy, a website communicates not with your computer’s IP (i.e. not with you) directly but with the proxy. Proxy functions as a mediator – it receives data you requested and then forwards it to you. Since the website addresses the data to the proxy, it does not know who requests the data making your online presence anonymous.

What is an IP rotation?

IP rotation enables you to swap your current proxy address with a different one(s) from a pool available. By regularly switching IPs you make it difficult for websites to flag activity of your device as suspicious, protecting your real IP address from being blocked. Rotation allows you to switch between unique addresses non-stop, while gaining marketing insights and collecting data are critical to your work.

Why use IP rotation?

In the digital era things like SEO optimization, web-scraping or web crawling play a huge role in your company’s development. To be ahead of the game and make informed decisions for your business, you need to constantly gather loads and loads of data about your product reviews, your website performance, competitors’ prices, current and potential clients, and many more. The usage of rotating proxies gives you an opportunity to actually do that without being blocked.

The common use cases

Reasons to use IP rotation:

to avoid getting blocked on targeted websites when you go beyond allowed limits. While performing the web-scraping, you use proxies to overcome the access limitations that websites set for one IP at a time. By rotating proxies, you can continually collect all the data you need as opposed to static (dedicated) proxies. You do not know ahead of time how many static proxies you will need to scrape it all from the target website and you cannot be sure how the target site blocks scraping. The rotating proxies will still be the better choice;
to go beyond any geo-restrictions. If a targeted website is blocked in your geographical region, you can use rotating proxies of those countries that have access to it to bypass those restrictions and scrape the data from the said website as much as you like;
to track your website’s performance, e.g. its speed or visibility. You can see how your website performs in different parts of the world (you can choose which ones). Based on that data you can then adjust your SEO optimization, make changes to your content and its promotion, or adjust to Google algorithms;
to aggregate data about prices. Proxy rotation is used to collect the specific data and to display it in a format that is easy to analyze. To ensure your prices are competitive on the market you need to harvest pricing information 24/7. Proxy rotation will allow you to run web scrapers without slowing down or delays in requests;
to avoid IP blockages on social media. Proxy rotation facilitates the operation of multiple different social media accounts from one PC. In the scenario of using IP rotation, bots and web scrapers that help in promoting your brand or products on social media are recognized as individual users so the targeted websites don’t have any reasons to block your IP on their platforms;
to cut costs when deploying bots and web-scrapers. Assigning unique proxies to each bot or a scraper is pricey since you need to create dozens or even hundreds of them to collect meaningful data. The cost of such an endeavour is a huge burden for your budget.

The IP rotation may occur through constant manual logging in and out or automatically in random order at regular intervals given the connection is active.

A login and logout rotation

Each social media bot must have its unique IP address to successfully perform. However, it does not mean that all bots must be running at the same time. You can switch between proxies for each of the bots. For example, a bot logs in via one IP address, likes a post or writes a comment, and then logs out. The proxy then rotates, and another bot can log in. Thus, you do not have to use unique IP addresses each time performing your tasks. Rotating proxies from the rented pool are much cheaper than using the dedicated ones.

A proxy rotation if you are scraping non-stop

Manual

As you already know, rotating IP addresses protects web-scrapers from being flagged as suspicious. Technically, this process can be done manually; but be prepared to perform loads of tedious error-prone work. Common mistakes in the manual rotation are using a limited number of proxies leading to their overuse or configuring the rotation inaccurately – thus, ending up banned due to bot-like activity.

Automatic

The automatic rotation is the best way to organize data-scraping and web crawling effectively and efficiently, because:

the same proxies are never used for extended periods of time instead they rotate regularly. A good proxy pool contains millions of IP addresses, making it virtually impossible to overuse any of them;
you can determine how many connections should occur before a new IP address is assigned;
specific IPs in specific locations can be chosen for ongoing connection;
the process does not require any monitoring.

With automatic proxy rotation data scraping and web-crawling are always safe, ongoing, accurate, and successful.

Is IP-rotation legal?

In general, websites do not like being scraped by bots and enforce anti-scraping and anti-crawling measures to avoid sharing their data. However, using a proxy to hide your identity while visiting these websites is indeed legal as long as you do not break any laws of the resident country in the process.

Is it safe to use rotating proxies when scraping the web?

IP rotation as a technology in itself is safe. However, using freely available proxy lists is quite risky, as their origins are unknown and they are not secure. In this case your private information, credit card or login details can be easily stolen. Chances of infecting your PC with malware through open proxies are also quite high. On the other hand, if you purchase proxies from premium and trusted proxy providers, you are getting not only real and safe IPs but also customer support that can help you mitigate any risks and concerns.

In conclusion

For your business to be competitive, you need to constantly optimize your company’s resources. Through the analysis of various relevant data you can optimize and automate your workflow, gain valuable market insights, improve your outreach, increase sales and ultimately reach new heights in your business. Rotating proxies can help you with that, making a task of growing your business much easier, more enjoyable and error-free. Thus, with a reliable proxy service provider like SOAX, you can have over 8,5 million IP addresses readily available worldwide to tirelessly deliver data needed for you to succeed. Try SOAX now.

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