Every major proxy provider sells rotating proxies and even presents them as a top choice for customers who don’t know what type fits them best. As with all emerging digital markets, proxy companies are full of marketing tricks that aren’t so easy to go over.

Here, I’m going to give five reasons why rotating proxies are not just a marketing trick to sell more proxies. Quite the opposite, they are a game changer that makes purchasing an IP address more accessible for everyone. Let’s start with the basics.

What are Rotating Proxies?

A proxy server is an intermediary device, not necessarily a server, as it can be a laptop or a smartphone, that routes your network requests. A result of such action is that your original IP address is not visible to the websites and services online.

All IPs are known to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) because they assign them, and websites can know your ISP just from the numbers in your IP. So, hiding your IP address behind a proxy device makes you more anonymous and harder to track online.

Rotating proxies takes it a step further. Instead of using one device to hide your IP address, a pool of multiple devices with their own IPs are used and changed at certain intervals. It makes your tracks even harder to detect since now there isn’t any one IP address that you are using to hide.

Every proxy type can be used as a rotating proxy. Some custom rotation setups, the ones not managed by the provider, may include multiple proxy types. In one hour, you might be using a smartphone in Serbia and a laptop in Argentina in the next. Some proxy types are better at rotation than others, but this gap is closing with the advances in internet speed.

• Mobile proxies are rotating by default, as cellular data providers must rotate the IPs to ensure that users can travel without losing the connection.
• Datacenter proxies are great at rotation because they are created virtually by using extremely fast commercial servers.
• Residential proxies can be used for rotation setups, but the impact on their performance is the most noticeable.

Combined or separately, each of these rotating proxy types can have some serious advantages against static counterparts. There are a few scenarios – social media management and bulk purchasing, where they don’t apply, but in most cases, rotating proxies are better. Below are five reasons why.

More Anonymity

Multiple proxy IPs are better than just one. If you have a static IP address and surf around the internet with it, corporations and governments can still collect your data. Sure, they will assign everything to your proxy IP address, which will not give them information about your location, but it’s a start.

If you aren’t careful, some clever browser fingerprinting might still pinpoint your identity to your proxy server, and it will get you anonymized. In the end, one proxy server is just an inconvenience for those who want to track you. What you really need is multiple IP addresses from different locations on rotation.

Better IP Legitimacy

If you use any kind of automation online, it will involve bots. Web scraping is the most common example, as it allows people and small companies to collect publicly available data that only big corporations want to control. Although they are in the wrong legally, they are still making things more complicated by collecting data by banning bots.

Proxy servers are invaluable for such purposes as they allow you to conceal the IP address of your bot, and even if it gets banned, you can change it to another and move on with your tasks. IP address legitimacy plays a crucial role here.

It refers to how well the IP address is received by major websites, such as Google, Amazon, or Facebook. The more restrictions the IP address faces, the lower its legitimacy is. It’s well-known that residential proxies are the most legitimate, but rotating these IPs increases the chances of them getting compromised to an almost impossible level.

Increased Performance

IP address rotation can increase the success rate of some tasks, thus increasing the overall performance of your proxies. While some speed might be lost when switching from one IP address to another, one IP address might have limitations on the data it can access.

For example, some websites limit how much information one IP address can download, or accessing too much of it may raise concerns from the administrators. That’s why if you aren’t sure whether one IP will be enough, you better use rotating proxies to be sure.

Lower Price

It does sound counter-intuitive, but purchasing multiple rotating proxies is cheaper than using one static server. The idea is that if the proxy server isn’t rotating, it needs to compensate by being extremely legitimate, and this comes at a cost.

The most legitimate static residential IP addresses can be three or even more times more expensive than datacenter counterparts. In this sense, you will save money by purchasing multiple datacenter proxies and rotating them.

Additionally, rotating proxies are almost always shared with other users. It lowers the legitimacy of IP addresses, but it also dramatically decreases costs.

Scalability

For a similar reason as above, rotation is much more scalable. If you purchase one expensive static proxy and your project grows to require more IPs, it will be inefficient to keep buying the same expensive proxies.

At some point, you will need to buy rotating proxies from a provider or set up your own rotation proxy pool. The latter option is not cheap, but it can scale your operations almost indefinitely.

Conclusion

There are a few tasks where rotation isn’t a wanted feature. However, there are so few of them that most customers can simply go with rotating ones and don’t bother thinking. It is especially true when you consider that rotating proxies are usually much cheaper and have better IP legitimacy, performance, and scalability.