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Do you wish to preserve your online security, access blocked content, and avoid being tracked by spies or federal agencies? If yes, you should buy a residential proxy that can help you achieve these goals. For the unaware, a proxy is a server between your computer and the web that masks your IP address and helps you to access even blocked websites and information.
To put it simply, a proxy functions as a middle party between your computer and the server of the website you are visiting. In this article, we detail the benefits of using rotating residential proxies.
What are Residential Proxies?
Residential proxies hide the default residential IP address your ISP (Internet Service Provider) allocates to you. The physical location of the computer can trace each IP address. Therefore, if you surf the web without using a proxy, you’ll give out information about your actual IP address and expose your cookies, browser preferences, etc.
Another disadvantage of using your real IP address is the inability to access geo-blocked content, as some websites may prevent visitors from certain nations from viewing their content. Those who use social media bots or scrape web info for SEO deployment and analysis could also be hampered as their actual IP address can be detected and blocked by websites. To overcome these issues, you can use a residential proxy.
What are Rotating Residential Proxies?
As the name suggests, these proxies rotate IP addresses to hide your real IP. This means each request you make will be made via a random and arbitrary IP address.
IP rotation can be achieved by revolving proxies at regular or random intervals. This method can be implemented using a data center and cheaper proxies. A rotating residential proxy is deployed as an anonymous proxy that completely conceals your actual IP.
The Synergy between Proxies and Web Scraping
Web scraping allows businesses to search for their competitors’ products and prices. Bots perform this ultra-fast automated process and give you all the needed data in real-time. You can access structured data to find specific info and instantly spot patterns and trends. Proxies are vital for web scraping as websites may ban a real IP that sends out numerous data requests in a short period of time.
Static vs. Rotating Proxies – Which is the Best for Scraping Product Information?
Large e-commerce players mostly like to perform data scraping and know well that their competition is doing the same. But, scraping bots can impact the consumer experience on e-commerce platforms as they send a high amount of requests and traffic, which can slow and even bring down the sites’ servers.
To overcome scraper bots’ problem, e-commerce platforms use anti-scraping measures that detect suspicious user requests and behavior. This is easy to do as the bot sends numerous and frequent requests from one IP address. This brings us to the topic of rotating vs. static proxies.
If you perform scraping on a large scale and target a substantial amount of product pages, then you’ll likely be blocked by the e-commerce site. For large-scale scraping, you need a high number of rotating or static proxies.
You may need repeated proxy rotation for some targets, while for others, you can use a single IP address. If you’re not aware of the number of static proxies needed to collect the required data or the likelihood of getting blocked by the targeted site, you can prefer to deploy rotating proxies.
Why Should Businesses Use Rotational IPs?
Let’s now discuss the benefits of rotational IPs for your business:
1. Evergreen IP Address
Rotating IP proxies refresh your IP address continuously and allow you to escape redirects or bans implemented by websites on sources from where they spot excessive requests. Thus, they are better than static proxies as they enable your application or research to scale to a greater level and fetch you a higher quantity of the desired data.
2. Highly Secure
Residential proxies are also termed back-connect or reverse proxies as they extract info from servers and then return the data to the client. The website’s servers do not know that a proxy has been used, making rotating residential proxies fully anonymous and unidentifiable.
3. Undetectable
Rotating proxies can use a large set of IPs at intervals, and this pool can go up to millions if needed. This huge number of IPs significantly reduces the chances of session monitoring by the targeted websites. This makes rotating residential proxies highly secure for web scraping companies.
Final Words
Now that you know the differences between rotating and static proxies, you can choose a suitable type to collect product data from e-commerce platforms. For large-scale scraping projects, your choice should depend on the target site. If there is a lack of info about the targeted website and you do not know whether it will block scraping, you’re better off deploying rotating proxies for your cause.
