Static vs Rotating Proxies: Use Cases & Which to Choose?

Key takeaways:

• Rotating proxies are mandatory to avoid rate limiting and scale web scraping.

• Static IPs help maintain consistent online identity necessary for social media marketing.

• Static datacenter proxies are easier to detect, but also more affordable.

• Residential rotating proxies easily avoid detection, but they can also experience speed drops.

A consistent IP address or IP rotation determines proxy use cases. For large-scale web scraping, automatic IP rotation is a must. However, managing multiple social media accounts requires the same IP address for each account.

It is essential to pick the right option. Otherwise, you will likely experience IP bans. Static vs rotating proxies differ in anonymity, connection speed, IP address source, detection risk, and pricing.

You don't want to purchase proxy bandwidth, which is unsuitable for your tasks. To help you choose, we've written a guide explaining static proxies and rotating IP addresses and when to use each.

What is a static proxy?

Static proxies keep the same IP address at all times. When you buy static proxies from a proxy provider, their IPs will remain the same as long as you maintain the subscription. Also, static proxies are typically hosted in datacenters with IPs issued by cloud providers and web hosting services (like Google Cloud and AWS).

But you may also purchase static residential proxies, also called ISP proxies. These proxies are also hosted in datacenters, but their IPs come from internet service providers. They benefit from excellent datacenter connection quality and the reliability of a residential IP address.

There are also static mobile proxies, but with a twist. Mobile carriers always rotate IPs to avoid IP exhaustion. However, proxy providers can assign you a dedicated SIM card or modem that retains the same IP address for as long as possible, usually up to 24 hours.

This is more like sticky sessions. A sticky IP address will remain the same for a while, but not always, like genuine static proxies. But rotating an IP address every several hours won't raise an alarm in most cases, especially if it's tied to the same geographical location and mobile carrier.

Benefits

• Consistent identity

A fixed IP address and sticky proxies help maintain a consistent online identity. Regular internet users do not change IPs very often. Although ISPs do rotate home internet users' IPs, it happens in less frequent intervals than with rotating proxies.

• Social media management

Static proxies are excellent for managing multiple social media accounts for marketing campaigns and brand visibility. You can assign a static proxy IP address to each social media account to make them look like separate users.

• Global IP pool

It is also beneficial for accessing geographically restricted content. You can select an IP address in the desired country, and static proxies will never change it to a different location. This way, you can browse the internet as if you were physically there. It opens up local streaming service libraries, like the US Netflix library or the BBC iPlayer in the UK.

Limitations

Keeping the same IP address also has its setbacks. Large-scale web scraping demands rotating different IP addresses to avoid detection and IP bans.

Also, if your static IP is banned, you need to set up a new connection again. If a rotating IP address is banned, the proxy provider simply issues another one, practically eliminating the downtime.

Another issue is online surveillance. If you seek an additional layer of online privacy, static proxies are easier to track. Since you use the same IP address all the time, all online actions go through the same proxy server.

What is a rotating proxy?

Rotating proxies change IP addresses at selected intervals. At MarsProxies, we can rotate an IP address every second, or you can choose sticky sessions for up to 7 days. That gives users room for flexibility. However, your IP address will change after the interval ends.

Genuine residential proxies offer rotating IPs. Because they use devices like PCs, laptops, and even smart TVs, they experience downtime when these are shut down. To avoid downtime, proxy providers connect to a different residential proxy and switch to its IP address.

You can also get rotating datacenter proxies. Proxy providers take a large number of datacenter IPs and configure their rotation.

It's a fast and cost-efficient method for web scraping, but only for publicly available and unprotected data. Content Delivery Network (CDN) services like Cloudflare and Akamai restrict datacenter IPs immediately in most cases.

In contrast, rotating mobile proxies are the best for scraping challenging sources. Because mobile IPs are shared across thousands of users, CDNs are much more reluctant to ban them. However, that comes at a price, as mobile proxies are among the most expensive types.

Benefits

• Online privacy protection

Because rotating proxies regularly change IP addresses, surveillance and data-mining agencies cannot trace online activity to a single IP address. Rotating IP addresses prevents location tracking, which is often used for targeted advertising.

• Avoid rate limiting

Websites implement rate limiting to defend against malicious bots, but that also affects web scrapers. Rotating proxies can assign a new IP address to each scraping request, minimizing the risk of bans and speeding up requests.

• Automatic failover

Even if you get banned, rotating proxies don't require any action to restore tasks. Typically, proxy providers ensure that once the proxy is banned, it automatically switches to the next working one.

Limitations

Rotating proxies aren't suited for casual browsing. Social networks or banking apps prefer a static residential IP address because that's what most internet users have. If you rotate IPs frequently, it can trigger their security system and log you out.

In many cases, they also have slower connection speeds than datacenter static proxies. Because they use another person's device, the connection speed depends on their internet plan.

Lastly, they can get pricey. Rotating proxies typically charge per gigabyte, so if you scrape a lot of data or stream in high resolutions, the price can quickly go up.

Static vs rotating proxies: key differences

Which proxy type should you choose?

Now that you know how exactly static and rotating proxies work, let's take a look at when you should choose which.

Choose static proxies for:

• Marketing campaigns

Social media has over 5 billion users worldwide, who can become potential buyers. With static proxies, you can create as many social media accounts as you need to maximize your outreach.

• Unrestricted content access

Whether it's governmental censorship or copyright laws, being locked out of desired content is frustrating. Static proxies are excellent for bypassing these restrictions. You simply connect to a server in a desired country and can browse the internet as if you were there.

• Ad verification

You can use static proxies to check if your ads are displayed correctly across different regions. As in the previous example, you need to choose a server in a country where you're advertising. This way, you will see the ads as locals do and verify whether they're in the right place at the right time.

Choose rotating proxies for:

• Web scraping

Rotating proxies are essential to scale web scraping. Rotating residential proxies have excellent trust scores, helping them avoid detection and bans. Simultaneously, IP rotation ensures your proxies aren't flagged as bots, maximizing scraping success rates.

• Private browsing

IP address tracking is a widely used online surveillance method. Rotating proxies ensure that your online activities cannot be traced back to a single IP address. Also, they are widely used with anti-detect browsers, which also mask your operating system and hardware details.

• Market research

Prices on online marketplaces change daily, and knowing the direction of those changes allows you to set yours accordingly. Large enterprises scrape millions of product prices, which requires proxy rotation to extract information quickly and accurately.

Common mistakes when choosing proxies

Before concluding, let's take a look at the most common mistakes people make when choosing static vs rotating proxies.

Choosing based only on price

It may be tempting to choose the most affordable proxies at hand, but that would be a mistake. Datacenter proxies are the most affordable but also the easiest to detect. In addition, they are static proxies by default, so they’re unsuitable for scraping protected websites.

Also, we don't recommend choosing free proxies. Firstly, they are typically shared proxies, meaning other people use their bandwidth at the same time. That makes free proxies slow. What's worse, some free proxies mine and sell user data, so using them for business purposes is very risky.

Ignoring target website restrictions

Making too many web scraping requests can slow a website down or even cause downtime. This is considered a severe violation and an unethical web scraping practice.

It's best to research the website's rules and general web scraping best practices before scraping the site using rotating proxies.

Also, you cannot scrape personally identifiable or copyrighted data, which is protected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and similar regulations worldwide. Keep in mind that websites have a robots.txt file, which outlines where web crawlers can go and which parts are restricted. Web scrapers should also follow similar rules to avoid conflicts with website owners.

Using static proxies for large crawls

Most websites use rate limiting for anti-bot protection, which also affects web scrapers. If websites (or CDNs) notice too many concurrent requests coming from the same consistent IP address, they flag it as a bot, restrict access, or block it.

That's why static and sticky proxies are only good for scraping unprotected data. In most cases, you need to use rotating proxies to ensure each HTTP request uses a different IP address. For the most challenging sources, consider using mobile proxies, which are much harder to ban.

Rotating too frequently

Rotating proxies too quickly is also a mistake. While scraping, you should try to mimic a real human browsing as closely as possible. And real people do not rotate their IPs in milliseconds.

Professional and highly reliable web scrapers use Python tools, such as BeautifulSoup, Playwright, and Selenium. These tools allow implementing delays, so that a certain time passes between HTTP requests. This way, it appears that different users are visiting the website, thereby increasing scraping success rates.

Conclusion

If you use rotating proxies for business operations, understanding the difference between them and static proxies is essential. It defines their use cases. More importantly, static or sticky proxies cannot perform the same tasks as rotating proxies. If you choose the wrong type, you will end up with unusable bandwidth.

Sometimes you may also need a consistent IP address for a while, which changes later on, called sticky sessions. For example, if you scrape shipping costs from shopping carts, you need sticky proxies to keep the same IP for one cart, but switch to a different IP for the next.

At MarsProxies, we offer all mentioned proxy types. If you have more questions about which to choose, feel free to ask them on our Discord server.