fbpx
Connect with us
Apply Now

Tech + Startups

How Rotating Proxies Can Improve Your Web Scraping Efforts

Web scraping is a very useful way for businesses to collect data that they can use for market research, pricing intelligence, improving SEO and many other uses. However, using your web scraper alongside a residential proxy is highly recommended if you really want to get the most benefits from your web scraping efforts. But, can a rotating proxy give even more advantages?

This article will look at IPs and how proxies can hide them for even better web scraping results. We’ll also look at the specific types of proxies that work best for web scraping, such as rotating residential proxies provided by Smartproxy. 

We’ll be covering the following topics on using rotating proxies for web scraping:

  • What is an IP address?
  • Why should you rotate your IP address?
  • The benefits of using a rotating proxy for web scraping

What Is An IP Address?

An IP or Internet Protocol address is a unique string of numbers used to identify a network accessing the internet. Your IP also goes much further than just identifying your network. It’s also essential for allowing communication between your device and the internet. Without an IP, we wouldn’t be able to use the internet. 

Static IP Address

A static IP address remains the same and doesn’t ever change. The only way to change the IP is by getting a new ISP or requesting a change from your current ISP – which may come at a cost. Alternatively, you can use tools like VPNs or a residential proxy to camouflage your IP and make it appear different.

Dynamic IP Address

A dynamic IP address changes every so often. These changes are initiated and monitored by your ISP. As such, you don’t get the privacy or online anonymity you would when using tools like proxies or VPNs. You also can’t use the new IPs to bypass geo-restrictions as they’ll still be tied to your physical location.

Why Should You Rotate Your IP Address?

Everyone has an IP address, and this unique identifier carries a lot of your personal information with it. From your IP, people can discover your name and surname, where you live, what devices you use, and some can even track your browsing history and location. 

However, if you’re a web scraping business, you might want to hide or rotate your IP address for another reason. Websites will take notice if you launch multiple web scraping requests from the same IP. Your IP might be banned, leading to incomplete or inaccurate data. 

Other advantages of rotating your IP address include:

  • Avoiding rate limits
  • It can speed up your internet connection
  • It assists with data scraping and mining to collect relevant information and metrics
  • It can be used to evaluate research to ensure quality and quantity
  • It can get you past geo-restrictions
  • It can help you source the best deals and prices

Ways To Hide Your IP?

There are a few different ways available to help you disguise your IP address and keep it from being tracked or blocked. You can use a VPN that disguises your IP and encrypts your data. While this might solve the privacy issues, it won’t help your web scraping efforts. You can also manually change your IP, although this is very technical and time-consuming. 

The best way is to invest in a rotating proxy. These are a special type of residential proxies that automatically changes (or rotates) your IP with each new request. Being a residential proxy also means that these devices will look and appear to be real users as the assigned IP is linked to a real device.

The Benefits Of Using A Rotating Proxy For Web Scraping

If your business relies on web scraping, or if you want to scale your web scraping efforts, then a rotating proxy is a must. First off, a rotating proxy will change the IP address of each new request. This means that each scraping request you send will be associated with its own IP. This will keep your scraping tool from getting banned. 

Many websites limit the number of requests that can be made by the same IP address within a certain period of time. By rotating your IP, you’ll be able to collect a lot more data from the same sites, as there won’t be any throttles on the IP. 

This also means you’ll be able to run unlimited parallel connections. This will make it much faster to collect data. This will also make it possible to scale your web scraping efforts and simultaneously collect as much data for various projects. 

Final Thoughts

Web scraping can be a very useful tool for collecting data. However, many web scrapers are finding that they need to rotate their IP address to benefit their scraping efforts. More websites are banning IPs that seem to spam the site or that appear to be web scrapers. As such, web scrapers that want to scale their operations need to look into a rotating proxy to automatically change their IP with each new request.

Related Topics:
Continue Reading


Copyright © 2022 Disrupt ™ Magazine is a Minority Owned Privately Held Company - Disrupt ™ was founder by Puerto Rican serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Tony Delgado who is on a mission to transform Latin America using the power of education and entrepreneurship.

Disrupt ™ Magazine
151 Calle San Francisco
Suite 200
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 00901

Opinions expressed by Disrupt Contributors are their own. Disrupt Magazine invites voices from many diverse walks of life to share their perspectives on our contributor platform. We are big believers in freedom of speech and while we do enforce our community guidelines, we do not actively censor stories on our platform because we want to give our contributors the freedom to express their opinions. Articles are not commissioned by our editorial team, and opinions expressed by our community contributors do not reflect the opinions of Disrupt or its employees.
We are committed to fighting the spread of misinformation online so if you feel an article on our platform goes against our community guidelines or contains false information, we do encourage you to report it. We need your help to fight the spread of misinformation. For more information please visit our Contributor Guidelines available here.


Disrupt ™ is the voice of latino entrepreneurs around the world. We are part of a movement to increase diversity in the technology industry and we are focused on using entrepreneurship to grow new economies in underserved communities both here in Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America. We enable millennials to become what they want to become in life by learning new skills and leveraging the power of the digital economy. We are living proof that all you need to succeed in this new economy is a landing page and a dream. Disrupt tells the stories of the world top entrepreneurs, developers, creators, and digital marketers and help empower them to teach others the skills they used to grow their careers, chase their passions and create financial freedom for themselves, their families, and their lives, all while living out their true purpose. We recognize the fact that most young people are opting to skip college in exchange for entrepreneurship and real-life experience. Disrupt Magazine was designed to give the world a taste of that.