Learning All About IP Rotation

In today’s digital world, we’ve all heard the term “IP address.” However, not all of us are experts, so some may not be aware of what it is and how it works.

IP stands for Internet Protocol, and an IP address is a numeric number that allows your computer to communicate with other devices over the web.

Now, if you’re using proxies, you can have several IP addresses. Having multiple IP addresses enables you to send tons of requests to your target site from several different IPs.

If you, however, always send out requests from the same IP, there’s no reason to have multiple addresses. Website servers only allow a specific number of requests from a single IP address within a specific period. Once the limit is exceeded, the server blocks the IP, and your connection to the website is aborted— this is where IP rotation comes in handy.

What Is IP Rotation?

Before we get into that, it’s good to have some basic knowledge about proxies. A proxy acts as a firewall or a web filter. It provides a shared network connection and can cache data to speed up requests. A great proxy server can keep you and your connection safe from all the bad stuff lurking in the wild internet.

There are different types of proxy servers, such as residential and datacenter proxies. Residential proxies are IP addresses provided to you by your ISP, while datacenter proxies are IPs issued by a subsidiary company, not your ISP.

Then there are dedicated, semi-dedicated, and rotating proxies. The dedicated proxies are used by you, semi-dedicated are shared by both you and other users, and rotating proxies happen to be the smartest of the bunch.

A rotating IP rotates several IP addresses from a large proxy pool to ensure they aren’t easily identified by websites. This indicates your IPs are being used evenly, and thereby reducing the odds of them getting blocked by web servers.

To avoid being identified as “suspicious,” you need to rotate IP after a short while. This will allow you to access your target sites from a different IP or location. Whether you’re a business scraping data or need to rotate IPs for your clients frequently, it’s crucial that you use a solid IP rotation proxy.

Methods Used for IP Rotation

IP rotation is done in 4 different ways:

• Specific IP rotation—the ISP selects a new IP for the outgoing web traffic once the connection gets disconnected.
• Pre-configured IP rotation—this method makes rotation happen at minute intervals. Once the time elapses, a new IP is provided to the user.
• Burst IP rotation—IPs are rotated according to a specified amount of internet connections. For example, if 30 connections are initiated, the 31st will originate from a completely different IP.
• Random IP rotation—each outgoing connection via the ISP is assigned a different/random rotating IP.

IP Rotation Legitimate Users

Now that we know what IP rotation is and how it’s done, who is it really for? IP rotation can come in handy for both businesses and private users. But it’s specifically designed for businesses of all shapes and sizes:

• SEO companies utilize IP rotation to determine keywords ranking in SERPs
• Business intelligence companies to harvest and/or retrieve data for in-depth data analysis
• Google, Yahoo, and Amazon use IP rotation to disperse the load of the networks
• Data warehouse to access larger selection from their destinations or and localities
• Corporate firms to get bypass geo-locked content
• Quantitative and qualitative research institutions to perceive variations
• Anti-counterfeiting and anti-piracy agencies for carrying out research on questionable content, as well as data harvesting.
• Private users to browse the web anonymously.

There are also illegitimate users of IP rotation, such as hackers, spammers, and intruders. They utilize IP rotation to confuse people using mail servers to spread spam emails to seem like they’re originating from various network blocks.

IP Rotation Service

If you’re a business, you can always buy a proxy plan that comes with an IP rotation proxy. But remember, this is where a good ISP can be useful. If your company needs a lot of rotating proxies for specific reasons, you’ll need a solid IP rotation service.

Also, you need to consider the algorithm used by these proxy servers. In order to rotate your IPs by yourself, you’re required to divide IP addresses into different groups, and then change them after a while. However, this is a bit complicated, and you might forget to do so quickly. Furthermore, using the same IP addresses over and over will make you seem suspicious.

IP rotators ensure to randomly rotate both the IPs and groups, thereby minimizing the chances of raising suspicion.

In fact, for more information on IP address rotation and an in-depth interview with a tech guy, I highly recommend reading this blog post on how to rotate an IP address.

Wrapping Up

If you made it this far, it’s safe to say that you know why a high-quality IP rotation proxy is necessary. Be it for extracting crucial data for your business, crawling the websites of your competition, or monitoring your clients’ proxies, using a reliable business-class proxy plan should be the priority of your business.