In-Depth Guide to IP Rotation and How to Use It for Scraping

Are you tired of hitting roadblocks while web scraping? A correct IP rotation strategy can unlock endless data access possibilities in your web scraping journey.

In this article, you'll learn in-depth about IP rotation, including its benefits, how it works, and specific examples demonstrating its application in web scraping.

Let's go!

What Is IP Rotation?

IP rotation means dynamically switching between multiple IP addresses to distribute outgoing traffic across different machines. The primary purpose of IP rotation is to mask your original IP address to access geo-restricted content, bypass rate-limited IP bans, or avoid triggering anti-bots.

IP rotation is common in web scraping but applies to several other fields, including web development, digital marketing, SEO, market analysis, cybersecurity, and more. 

Most proxy providers offer IP rotation out of the box, but you can implement it programmatically during scraping. Generally, it requires changing your IP address at intervals from a pool of multiple IPs gathered across different locations. These IPs can belong to datacenters, mobile services, or residential internet users.

Benefits of IP Rotation

Now you know what IP rotation is. Here are some of the reasons you may want to use it:

• Enhanced anonymity: Constantly changing your IP address makes it difficult for websites and trackers to identify and profile your online activities. Masking your location and other identifying details reduces the risk of personal information exposure.
• Improved security: IP rotation also protects you from threat actors, making it harder for hackers to target specific devices or networks.
• Getting unlocked: Some websites limit requests and ban IPs that make multiple requests within a particular interval. Distributing traffic across multiple IPs makes it look like you're requesting as different users, preventing potential IP bans. Additionally, by changing your location, IP rotation helps access region-locked content.
• Buying sneakers: Browsing sneaker pages with multiple IP addresses increases your chances of securing limited-edition sneakers during high-demand releases. Many sneaker websites also use anti-bot measures to prevent specific IPs from accessing their websites during high demand. You can avoid that by rotating your IPs.
• Improved connectivity: Some internet service providers (ISPs) intentionally slow down internet speeds for certain activities or users. Rotating your IP address can help you access the internet without these restrictions.

Types of IPs Available for Rotation

There are four major IP types based on origin. Let's explain each briefly below.

• Datacenter IPs: These are IPs provided by servers mostly owned by cloud hosting providers. Most security measures block these IPs since they have a known origin.
• ISP IPs: Like datacenter IPs, ISP IPs are hosted on a server. The only difference is that ISP IPs are registered with internet providers, making them more natural and less detectable than pure datacenter IPs.
• Residential IPs: These are IP addresses assigned to daily internet users by network providers. They're more natural and more suitable for mimicking actual users, enhancing anonymity significantly.
• Mobile IPs: Mobile IPs are closely related to residential IPs, except they're assigned explicitly to cellular networks. They mimic the characteristics of mobile devices by changing more frequently as the devices move between different cell towers. This attribute makes mobile IPs more anonymous compared to residential types.

However, IPs have various use cases regardless of origin or type. Let's consider them next.

IP Rotation Use Cases

As mentioned earlier, IP rotation has many use cases across various fields. Here are some applications of IP rotation in real-life cases:

• Load balancing: IP rotation applies to web development during load balancing and testing tasks, which involves distributing traffic across multiple servers to improve performance and reliability. 
• Ad placement: Experts use IP rotation and geo-specific IPs to place random cross-regional ads or post ads in specific regions where they have limited or no access. 
• SEO monitoring: SEO experts also rotate IPs to analyze content rankings from various geographic perspectives.
• Market analysis: IP rotation helps market researchers gain insights into regional product sentiment and pricing differences.
• Cybersecurity: One of the most popular applications of IP rotation in cybersecurity is penetration testing, which simulates distributed attacks across different locations to improve test coverage.
• Email marketing: Many email providers use IP reputation to filter spam. Email marketers use IP rotation to reduce the chances of their emails getting flagged as spam.
• Social media management: Social media promoters and content creators use IP rotation to avoid rate-limiting, a common posting control measure on social sites.
• Web scraping: During web scraping, IP rotation helps avoid rate-limited or geo-restricted IP bans and mimics different users to increase the chances of bypassing anti-bot detection. We'll discuss this further in the next section.

Why Is It Crucial to Rotate IPs While Web Scraping?

Web scraping usually involves sending multiple requests through automated programs. Most websites limit the requests a user can send within a particular time frame. If the user goes beyond this permitted limit, the website bans their IP address temporarily or, worse, permanently.

The IP ban occurs because the user requests from the same IP address multiple times, allowing the website to track the traffic from that IP. For example, if you spin a bot to crawl 200 pages on a website like Amazon using the same IP address, you can get banned after the 20th attempt, causing the remaining 180 requests to return empty data.

Rotating your IP address at intervals allows you to simulate multiple users' behavior and distribute your traffic across several IPs. That way, you can even make thousands of requests with a high success rate because the website sees your requests as coming from different machines and doesn't block them. 

However, IP rotation is costly because you'll source the IPs mostly from proxy providers, which charge you for the service. But it's worth it since it increases the success of your scraping tasks. 

IP Rotation Code Examples (Python, Node.js)

So far, you've seen that IP rotation is essential to web scraping. This section provides practical examples of manually rotating IPs in Python and JavaScript, the two most popular programming languages. 

We'll use free proxies from the Free Proxy List, and you'll request https://httpbin.io/ip, a test website that returns your IP address in each request.

IP Rotation in Python

To implement manual proxy rotation in Python, you'll use the Requests library as the HTTP client to request the target website.

Before starting, ensure you install Requests with pip:

pip3 install requests

First, import the Requests library and itertools. itertools is a built-in Python library; you'll use it to rotate proxies. Then, create a proxy list from the Free Proxy List website:

# import the required libraries
import requests
import itertools

# create a proxy list (create your own proxy list)
proxy_list = [
    {
        "http": "http://27.64.18.8:10004",
        "https": "http://27.64.18.8:10004",
    },
    {
        "http": "http://161.35.70.249:3128",
        "https": "http://161.35.70.249:3129",
    },
    # ...
]

Define a proxy rotator function that returns a generator to cycle the proxy list and instantiate it:

# ...

# define a proxy rotator using a generator
def proxy_rotator(proxy_list):
    return itertools.cycle(proxy_list)

# create a generator from the proxy rotator function
proxy_gen = proxy_rotator(proxy_list)

Use a for loop to rotate the proxy for four requests by adding the proxies keyword argument to your request parameter (you can increase the request count if you want). The next function ensures that the rotator function returns the next proxy in the list, such that when exhausted, it restarts the rotation from the first proxy address:

# ...

# rotate the proxies for four requests
for i in range(4):
    # send a request to httpbin.io
    response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip", proxies=next(proxy_gen))
    # print the response text to see your current IP
    print(response.text)

Combine the snippets, and you'll get the following complete code:

# import the required libraries
import requests
import itertools

# create a proxy list (create your own proxy list)
proxy_list = [
    {
        "http": "http://27.64.18.8:10004",
        "https": "http://27.64.18.8:10004",
    },
    {
        "http": "http://161.35.70.249:3128",
        "https": "http://161.35.70.249:3129",
    },
    # ...
]


# define a proxy rotator using a generator
def proxy_rotator(proxy_list):
    return itertools.cycle(proxy_list)


# create a generator from the proxy rotator function
proxy_gen = proxy_rotator(proxy_list)

# rotate the proxies for four requests
for i in range(4):
    # send a request to httpbin.io
    response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip", proxies=next(proxy_gen))
    # print the response text to see your current IP
    print(response.text)

The code returns four IPs, as shown. You'll see that it restarts on the third output, proving that it rotates the IPs as desired:

{"origin": "27.64.18.8:78772"}
{"origin": "161.35.70.249:87662"}
{"origin": "27.64.18.8:98813"}
{"origin": "161.35.70.249:88266"}

Let's see how to achieve this in Node.js.

IP Rotation in Node.js

For IP rotation in Node.js, we'll use Axios to request the same target website (https://httpbin.io/ip) and view the returned IP address.

Install Axios if haven't already:

npm install axios

Then, import Axios and create a proxy list from the Free Proxy List website:

// import Axios
const axios = require('axios');

// create a proxy list (create your own proxy list)
const proxyList = [
    { ip: '162.245.85.220', port: '80' },
    { ip: '5.196.65.71', port: '3128' },
    // ...
];

Now, create a proxy rotator function (rotateProxy). This function picks the next available proxy address from the proxy list, returns it once used, and repeats the cycle for each address on the list:

// ...

// function to rotate through the list of proxies
const rotateProxy = () => {
    // get the next available proxy
    const proxy = proxyList.shift();
    // add the current proxy back to the end of the list
    proxyList.push(proxy);
    return {
        protocol: 'http',
        host: proxy.ip,
        port: proxy.port,
    };
};

You can now use the function to rotate proxies for your Axios requests. Use a for loop to execute four Axios requests, adding the rotateProxy function as the proxy parameter:

// ...

// rotate proxies for four requests
for (let i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
    axios
        // send request with the proxy
        .get('https://httpbin.io/ip', {
            proxy: rotateProxy(),
        })
        .then((response) => {
            // log the response data
            console.log(response.data);
        })
        .catch((error) => {
            // log request error if any
            console.error('Error:', error);
        });
}

Combine all the snippets. Here's the final code:

// import Axios
const axios = require('axios');

// create a proxy list (create your own proxy list)
const proxyList = [
    { ip: '162.245.85.220', port: '80' },
    { ip: '5.196.65.71', port: '3128' },
    // ...
];

// function to rotate through the list of proxies
const rotateProxy = () => {
    // get the next available proxy
    const proxy = proxyList.shift();
    // add the current proxy back to the end of the list
    proxyList.push(proxy);
    return {
        protocol: 'http',
        host: proxy.ip,
        port: proxy.port,
    };
};

// rotate proxies for four requests
for (let i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
    axios
        // send request with the proxy
        .get('https://httpbin.io/ip', {
            proxy: rotateProxy(),
        })
        .then((response) => {
            // log the response data
            console.log(response.data);
        })
        .catch((error) => {
            // log request error if any
            console.error('Error:', error);
        });
}

The JavaScript proxy rotator outputs the following IPs for four consecutive requests:

{origin: '5.196.65.71:38374'}
{origin: '162.245.85.220:45412'}
{origin: '5.196.65.71:59646'}
{origin: '162.245.85.220:34754'}

That's it! You just implemented proxy rotation in Python and Node.js. 

However, some services help you do this automatically and remove the stress of manual setup. Keep reading to learn about some of them.

Best Proxy Providers for IP Rotation

Manually rotating proxies wastes development time and isn't sustainable at scale. Thankfully, most premium proxy providers offer built-in IP auto-rotation. Let's see three of the top ones below.

1. ZenRows - Residential Rotating Proxies for Web Scrapers

ZenRows is the best residential proxy provider tailored for web scraping and crawling at scale. It offers auto-rotating and sticky proxies with geo-targeting at a competitive price, starting at $5.5/GB.

In addition to residential proxies, ZenRows gives you access to full-fledged web scraping API to avoid getting blocked, including anti-bot and CAPTCHA auto-bypass, headless browsing, auto-parser, and more. One of the strong points about ZenRows is that all these services are available under the same price cap, and it only charges you for successful requests.

2. Proxyrack - Rotating Datacenter Proxies Without Caps

Proxyrack offers residential and datacenter proxies and allows an unlimited number of concurrent requests. It also supports proxy auto-rotation and geo-targeting. However, it's more expensive at $5/GB, considering it's exclusively a proxy provider and doesn't offer extra scraping solutions like a scraping API or anti-bot auto-bypass.

3. IPRoyal - High-Quality Rotating Proxies

IPRoyal is the go-to option if you're looking beyond residential and datacenter proxies. In addition to these two, it also provides mobile and ISP proxies. One feature that differentiates it from the other two providers is its free browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

Like the other recommendations, IPRoyal offers proxy rotation and geo-targeting. However, it's also strictly a proxy provider and doesn't offer advanced scraping functionalities, such as anti-bot auto-bypass. IPRoyal is also expensive, charging $7/GB for its residential proxy service.

IP Rotation Isn't Enough to Get Unblocked

Spamming a website with a single IP address can result in an IP ban. IP rotation prevents that by routing your request through several IPs. 

However, websites use many other methods to block bots besides IP bans. These include CAPTCHAs, JavaScript challenges, web application firewalls (WAFs) like Cloudflare and DataDome, and more. IP rotation is usually less effective in those cases.

If rotating datacenter IPs don't work, the next option is to use premium proxies with quality residential IPs. However, the only solution that will work 100% of the time is a web scraping API, such as ZenRows. ZenRows is an all-in-one scraping toolkit for bypassing any anti-bot at scale. In addition to anti-bot auto-bypass, it features User Agent optimization, built-in residential proxy auto-rotation, and more.

Conclusion

In this article, you've learned in-depth about IP rotation, how it works, and its benefits in web scraping, preventing rate-limiting and IP bans and reducing the chances of anti-bot detection. You've also implemented manual IP rotation in Python and Node.js and seen three top tools to implement automatic IP rotation. 

That said, remember that websites go beyond IP tracking and banning to secure their content. Most sites employ anti-bot measures, which may be difficult for IP rotation alone to bypass. To step up your scraping game and beat these security measures more effectively, we recommend using ZenRows. This complete web scrapping solution offers all the anti-bot bypass toolkits you need to scrape any website without getting blocked.  

Try ZenRows now!