IP Rotation: What is it? How to turn on an IP address

If you've been researching site scraping or automation, you've undoubtedly heard about IP restrictions. The positive news is that changing IP address is an easy way to avoid IP limitations. However, what exactly is IP rotation, and how is it configured? This article is all about "IP Rotation: What is it? How to turn on an IP address".

IP Rotation: What is it?

IP rotation is a technique that substitutes a random IP address in place of your current IP address. This may occur in response to a connection request, at the end of a certain time, or under other circumstances.

When you sign up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you are assigned an IP address, either dynamically or statically. Static IPs never change, but dynamic IPs rotate automatically.

Due to the limited supply of addresses, most consumer providers often provide dynamic IPs. The IP address assigned to you by your Internet provider is drawn from a pool of previously unused addresses. After some time, it is returned to the pool, and you are assigned a new address.

But there is not much predictability about this process. That being said, it cannot be considered a form of IP rotation, at least not in a form that facilitates site scraping and automation. You can modify your IP address in other, more reliable ways.

Why do IP addresses rotate?

Has anyone ever tried to extract data from Google or any other website? If not, you may find that your actions are restricted because no one enjoys web scrapers or crawlers.

First of all, checking a user's IP address is the simplest way to identify bot-like activity on a website. Because you will be sending a lot of connection requests from one address when you scrape data, if you don't cycle your IP, there is a good risk that your rate will be limited or restricted.

Recurring CAPTCHAs are another hassle. Most likely, you've heard that domains use them to prevent bots from gaining unwanted access. CAPTCHAs can cause web scrapers to stop working, often causing data collection operations to fail. One of the best strategies to prevent CAPTCHA is to alternate between high-quality IPs.

Methods to rotate IP addresses: 

1. Use a VPN.

Using a VPN is one way to change your IP address. VPNs work well for geo-restricted content access and IP hiding, although there are some problems with automated processes.

For example, if you want to retrieve data from multiple pages on the same website without getting blacklisted, you will need several different IPs. Users can arrange for IP rotation to occur every few minutes with some VPN service providers. Unfortunately, the web scraping process is extremely slow because they only provide you with one IP at a time.

Also, although VPNs change your IP address and location, they do not hide the fact that you are using them. Whether you plan to use the tool for task automation or data collection, it puts a huge burden on your back.

Deploy a proxy server.

To change your IP address, you can also use a proxy server. Proxy servers allow you to operate multiple connections simultaneously using different IP addresses, which makes them particularly useful for scraping. Additionally, you can select IP addresses from different parts of the world to avoid geo-restrictions.

Proxies from free online lists are not something I would recommend using, as they are unreliable, may contain promotions, and may do bad things with your data. I can go on and on about the benefits of using a paid proxy. My advice is to consider using a paid proxy service.

Using a Proxy to Configure IP Address Rotation 

1. Get IP rotation software.

If programming is not your thing, you may want to use IP rotation software. This program works exceptionally well if you have a proxy list.

There are programs like Mugeng and Elite Proxy Switcher available on GitHub. In short, with each request, the rotator randomly picks an IP address and assigns a new one.

IP rotation software can slow down your web scraper, even though it is an easy way to scrape simple websites. Additionally, it may seem restrictive or disorganized, especially if you are creating your own web scraping software. This is why small to medium-sized projects are ideally suited for this type of software.

2. Configure IP rotation yourself.

Another option, depending on your level of programming expertise, is to write your own code to set up IP rotation.

There are many Internet guides available to help you set it up. The most widely used programming languages are PHP (Laravel, Symfony), Node.js (Cheerio, Puppeteer), and Python (Beautiful Soup, Scrapy).

If you are willing to learn programming but are not particularly skilled at it, then Python is the best choice for you. You can use a web crawling framework like Scrapy or use Requests and the Beautiful Soup library. The latter is more complex but also has more features.

On your own, setting up IP rotation can be difficult. Especially if you want the rotation logic to be robust enough to, for example, allow a recently used IP to cool down before returning it to the game. It is even more difficult to maintain it.

Read More: Why are proxy subnets important and what does it mean?

3. Invest in rotating proxies, or IP rotation services.

With each connection request, a roaming proxy automatically replaces your IP address with a new one. As a result, your web scraping job can continue without reaching its limits. Imagine getting 5,000 different IP addresses when a script is executed to send 5,000 queries to any number of websites.

You can access a pool of IP addresses with roaming proxies, which are available from many companies on the market. Every month, some providers manage over 100 million unique IP addresses.

A rotating proxy works by not providing you with an IP address list. You can skip importing long proxy lists because they use a BackConnect gateway server that automatically generates new addresses for you.

You can filter rotating proxies by ASN, country or city, or supplier, among other attributes. The best thing about them is how simple they are to install.

Rotating proxies have one disadvantage: You lose some control over IP usage history, even if it requires no further work on your part. However, this is not an issue because proxy companies supply huge IP pools that are more difficult to block than smaller proxy lists.