What is a Rotating Proxy?

If you’ve been using the internet for any amount of time and purpose you’ve probably run into issues regarding the content being unavailable in your region, or perhaps plane tickets being more expensive when revisiting the site multiple times. visit here

Proxies can help solve these issues and many more, but what about rotating proxies? You may have heard of them and wondered “What’s the difference between those and regular proxies?”

In this text, we hope to help you better understand the ups, downs, functions, and purposes of rotating proxies. If you need any help seeing if specific proxies are better than others a great place to go would be a review aggregator site such as Truely.

Rotating? What’s a regular proxy?

A proxy server is an intermediary that separates you from the content you are browsing. Why is this important? It comes down to the added functionality of modern proxy servers.

Most proxy servers today provide a decent deal of security and privacy. It acts as a sort of secondary firewall and also the privacy gained can be quite valuable to have as more privacy is always a benefit. 

While proxy servers can reduce your internet speed while browsing if you are going through content that isn’t network-intensive then it usually won’t make too much of a difference. It is still important to be aware of this downside.

What does the rotating part mean then?

As the name might suggest, rotating proxies provide you with a new IP address each time you send a request to the website you are browsing. Unlike static proxies, they come with multiple IP addresses which gives them added functionality over regular proxies.

This can be quite useful if you do a lot of research into digital marketing. The anonymity rotating proxies provide is far greater than even regular proxies which makes them an invaluable asset to anyone who wishes to remain unknown (as much as possible) online. 

Rotating proxies can be used for everything from web scrawling to avoiding IP bans and everything in between. The possibilities are truly endless and as with any technology they just keep improving over time.

What are all the benefits of a rotating proxy?

While rotating proxies have countless upsides there are a few that stand out from the rest as most important to the average user.

1. Increased security – the many IP addresses that rotating proxies provide you with combined with the security features that all proxies have gives you far greater safety than what you would have without a rotating proxy on your side. Those who wish to track your IP will have a far harder time. Remember however that the greatest security is provided by paid rotating proxies as they have a greater array of features compared to their free brethren.
2. Large IP pool – if you are doing some research and need to visit the same site multiple times in a short time you may get flagged as suspicious since they will see the same IP revisiting an odd number of times. If you use a rotating proxy however it will seem as if multiple people had visited rather than one person with multiple IPs which will greatly reduce the chance of getting flagged and/or banned. A constantly changing IP makes research far less risky as you don’t have to worry about IP bans.
3. Avoiding rate limits – some sites may limit your bandwidth or rate if you are on it with the same IP for an extended amount of time. If you are using a rotating proxy and changing your IP frequently enough then you can completely circumvent this. Considering how much of a pain IP throttling can be this is a great bonus.

ies enough though?

While it’s clear that rotating proxies are far better than static proxies, are they really necessary? It depends on what you’re doing. If you just need to hide your IP so you can watch Netflix shows that aren’t available in your region or for some other region-locked content you want then you can probably get away with using a static proxy.

For people who scrape sites for info or research purposes and similar purposes where you revisit a site many times, it may be worth looking into rotating proxies so the risk of an IP ban is circumvented. As for things like price comparisons, while a static proxy is enough it is often far more efficient to use a rotating proxy for this purpose so it once again may be worth looking into one if it’s something you frequently do.

Paid vs. free rotating proxies

As with most topics related to apps and programs it is often necessary to compare the free options to the paid ones. It’s obvious that most paid proxies will be superior to their free counterparts but just how big of a deal is it?

To put it simply, you are usually going to be using proxies for privacy and security. While paying for a proxy may seem like a waste of money, remember that the money is going towards your online safety. When you look at it that way the cost can seem far lower.

While a free proxy is usually better than no proxy we seriously recommend looking into a decent paid one as they will for the most part provide you with not only a far greater level of security and anonymity but a lot of them also have better customer support which is a big plus if you end up running into any kind of issues along the way.

Conclusion

Rotating proxies are a must-have for online researchers and scrapers, but are also definitely worth looking into and important for the average Joe as well. Both the security and also access to region-locked are something almost anyone would want.

Remember though that if you don’t need a rotating proxy, some static option could be worth still considering at least for the content you can’t see from your current region, if not for the massive security increase you may need at times.