What are rotating proxies or rotating IPs?
A rotating IP refers to a type of proxy server that changes the IP address it uses to connect to the data source on a regular basis. The most basic rotation is based on “Round Robin” – meaning that every HTTP request is using a different IP address towards the target host or data source. Rotating IPs are often used for web scraping or to bypass website blocks and restrictions, as it makes it more difficult for the target website to track and block the IP address.
Why you should consider IP rotation
When scraping or crawling a website, requests are sent much faster than a human from the same IP. Websites can easily flag the IP being used as a bot or crawler and send misleading information or block you completely. Sites employ these rate limitations to protect themselves from attacks or unwanted behavior. By periodically changing, or rotating, your IP address, you can avoid rate limitations and fly under the radar. This ensures that target sites cannot identify your IP as a crawler. Rotating proxies can increase your success rate and get you the data you desire.
How do I rotate my IP address?
Well… you don’t need to do much if you work with Bright Data! it is AUTOMATIC… Our default setup is a Round Robin rotation: a different IP address will be used for every request you send thru our proxies. Bright Data provides ways to control this rotation, or even disable it.
So – in order to use our rotating proxies, just define a set of proxies for your exclusive use or use our shared proxies pool, and rotation will work like magic.
Basic rotation control with Bright Data proxy zone
We provide ways to control the rotation, or even disable it:
- Directing a request to a specific proxy IP with our -ip option
- Directing a sequence of requests to a specific proxy ip using our -session-[some session ID] will assure all those requests are routed via the same proxy
- Explicit routing via a specific proxy IP address using our -const option will assure request is routed only thru the proxy you elected, and fail otherwise.
You can read more on our supported options for rotation, as well as other features in this page: Proxy configuration options.
Advanced rotation control with Bright Data Proxy Manager
Bright data offers a proxy control utility which enables you to apply advanced rules and settings, define local addresses and automatic requests’ retry in by different proxy network to increase success rates and optimize your expense.
The proxy manager advanced rotation features include the following capabilities:
- Rotate per response time
- Rotate per connection time
- Rotate and retry per response body
- Rotate and retry per response header
- Rotate and retry on response code
- Rotate and retry with a different proxy type (different network – like move from Datacenter to residential)
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