In my previous article I dove into the specific use cases of residential proxies, which are mainly used by businesses these days. Today let’s take a look at a more specific proxy technology called rotating residential proxies — how they work and why would you need them.
As defined in my previous topic residential proxies have direct association with an ISP thus making them the least likely proxy type to be blocked by websites. Rotating your residential proxies would be a useful practice in a couple different projects, as it would make it virtually impossible to get blocked by any website.
What is a rotating residential proxy?
Unlike static proxies which provide you with a single IP address, rotating proxies allow you to access a pool of different IP addresses. This allows you to be connected through a different IP address at any given time. Usually it’s set to change in a set period of time or in some cases depending on how many requests you send out, changing when you reach a certain number of them.
What are the use cases for rotating residential proxies?
While there are probably more use cases for this type of proxy technology I will be covering the two that are most know / most used these days:
Web scraping — is the process that uses the most proxies in general. Web scraping is the automated process of collection data off of the web. Basically, it’s a bot accessing any given website and collecting the set data. This process is resource intensive in terms of proxy servers, especially due to the fact that most websites do not want their data to be collected. There are many reasons for that and we won’t get into them in this article, but basically proxy servers help a web scraping bot disguise itself as a different genuine person every time it rotates the IP address it connects under. And due to the fact that the IP is changed, the website cannot block the connections the scraper makes.
Sneaker bots — another automated process that takes the advantage of anonymity residential proxies provide. Sometimes you might see “sneaker proxies” being marketed, but under the hood they are just simple residential proxies. What sneaker bots are used for is, whenever there’s a new sought after sneaker is released and sold on online shops these, bots can access the said shop and purchase sneakers automatically. You might ask why would you want to do that automatically? Well the answer is pretty simple there are tons of people buying sneakers on their release you might be surprise how competitive this market is. Some people also use these bots to buy sneakers in bulk and resell them at higher prices afterwards. If you have a bot that can act as different people it will help you overcome limitations of the seller website (usually they allow purchase of limited count of sneakers per person).
Rotating residential proxy providers
Residential pool size is one of the more bigger factors that you should look in to when choosing a provider (as well as the quality of proxies themselves) so I will be listing some of the bigger players in this market:
Oxylabs
Smartproxy
Scraperapi
Edit: I have found a discount code in one of the coupon pages, so if you use “COUPONIT” you can get 10% discount on residential proxy plans for Oxylabs.
Final thoughts
While automation is getting bigger and bigger in online tasks such as data collection and even the sneaker buying market, residential proxies are becoming a more popular means to make these processes more reliable. With residential proxy rotators these tasks are becoming even easier to accomplish and if you’re considering to take on such a task you should invest in this technology.
This article was originally posted on medium.
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