What Is a Rotating Proxy and How Does It Work
While you are using the Internet, you can be found via your IP address. The IP address is an Internet Protocol address that is a numerical label unique to you and therefore can be associated with you. You may want to protect your IP address and consequently your privacy for multiple reasons. There are two routes you can take to solve this issue.
How can you protect your IP address?
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We have all heard about VPNs. They are the first solution to this problem and they help you protect your IP address by assigning you a new one that is connected to their VPN server and in that way protects your privacy. The second one is a rotating proxy. If you have never heard of it, the rotating proxy can be defined as a server that assigns a new IP address from the proxy pool every time you make a connection request. The proxy pool consists of millions of different IPs and with that being said, you don’t have to worry about getting the same IP address twice in a row because there are so many that it is impossible. It is also important to mention that these IP addresses fall into different geographical regions.
You can use rotating proxies for multiple purposes, they can give you anonymity and allow you many different actions such as collecting large amounts of data or even site crawling or scraping.
How do rotating proxies work?
As we have said, you will get a new IP address with every connection request. It is simple and effective as that. You can try to visually imagine rotating proxies to choose a new IP address from a huge proxy pool. You can choose from different types of proxies or in other words from rotating or sticky sessions. These two differ in the amount of time you spend with the same IP address. If you want it to change with every request then you use the rotating session but if you want the same IP address for a longer period of time, you will use sticky. Sticky sessions allow you to use the same IP address for up to 30 minutes.
Why should you use rotating proxies?
First of all, we have already mentioned that they can help you stay anonymous and in that way protect your privacy and security on the Internet. You are not using just a single IP address, you are using a pool of different IP addresses which makes it way harder. Your personal information will not be shared and you won’t have to worry that it will get into the “wrong hands”. We have also mentioned scraping and crawling which can be defined as follows – crawling is used to index information on the Internet while scraping is used to reclaim specific information. Scraping and crawling websites can be easily done with rotating proxies and you won’t have to worry about being blacklisted or denied access to sites. Sometimes, even without doing anything, your IP address can be denied access to a certain site because of your geographical location, and by using rotating proxies, you can solve that issue and easily access any site.
To conclude:
In this article, we have talked about rotating proxies. We have defined them and explained how they work and concluded that they can be very helpful, effective, and beneficial. If you need to hide your IP address for any reason and want to do it in a way that includes a pool of different IP addresses – then a rotating proxy is the right solution for you.
