Sticky vs. Rotating Proxies: Which to Use?
The difference between sticky vs. rotating proxies lies in their mode of operation.
A proxy is a web server acting as an agent between a user and the server containing information.
Businesses, developers and Internet marketers use web proxies for various reasons. For example:
- E-commerce businesses can use proxies to extract public product data from common marketplaces like Amazon.
- Typical internet surfers can use free proxies to bypass content bans in restricted regions.
- Internet marketers use proxies to do SEO checks on competitors' websites.
- Data scientists, engineers and developers also use proxies to collect vast amounts of data and save time without getting blocked.
In this guide, you'll understand the key distinctions, specific use cases and examples of industry-leading tools. Before diving into any of these scraping operations, users have to understand the difference between sticky vs. rotating proxies.
Let's brush through the basics of sticky and rotating proxies, as well as the differences.
Difference Between Sticky and Rotating Proxies
Understanding the difference between a sticky proxy vs. rotating proxy will help you choose the right tool for each workload.
In general, rotating proxies are ideal for heavier workloads because they alternate connections from a pool of various IP addresses. The main difference between sticky and rotating proxies is that a sticky proxy associates a single IP address per user request. In contrast, a rotating proxy assigns various IP addresses for each new request.
What Is a Sticky Proxy?
A sticky proxy gives one IP address for an anonymous connection. It has several limitations since anti-scraping technologies can easily identify heavy traffic coming from a single IP address. Sticky proxies anonymize connections from a single IP address, known as sticky sessions.
An example of a sticky proxy provider is the free web proxy tool by HMA.
As you can see, the data centers we can choose from are limited. Other examples of static proxy vendors include Psiphon, Apify, Bright Data and many more.
To make sticky proxies more efficient, users need an inbuilt feature known as a proxy rotator. Mobile phones don't provide the privacy you need to scrape a website unless you're using a VPN.
That's because anti-scraping bots can recognize when there's heavy incoming traffic from that IP address, which leads us to rotating proxies.
What Is A Rotating Proxy?
A rotating proxy tool provides a wide pool of IP addresses to choose from, and unlike a sticky proxy, rotating proxies don't need a proxy rotator. They generate a new unique IP address for each new request or browsing session.
The target site receives connections from various whitelisted IP ranges, making it difficult for the host server to detect any suspicious activity. Developers can configure specific commands within rotating proxies to define how they connect to various servers in different geolocations.
Now that we've gone through the basics, let's see why the sticky proxy vs. rotating proxy comparison is relevant in terms of use cases.
Sticky vs. Rotating Proxies: Which Should I Use?
Choosing between sticky vs. rotating proxies can be confusing at first. But once you understand use cases, making the right decision is easier.
For example, the competitive nature of online businesses has a real need for rotating proxies. If multiple sellers have the same product, the chances of customers shopping around for the best deals are high.
Marketers can use a rotating proxy to check e-commerce websites for data like prices, product descriptions and other attributes to keep up with trends. Also, rotating proxies can extract and export millions of requests without getting blocked.
Extracting large datasets from various geolocations is a time-consuming process, so developers prefer rotating proxies. Let's discuss some pros and cons of rotating and sticky proxies.
When To Use Sticky Proxies?
👍 Pros:
Sticky proxies aren't bad; here are some of the things they can do:
- Manage social media accounts.
- Monitor e-commerce deals across regions.
- Conduct market research.
- Browse for longer periods.
- Minimize data exchange.
1. Easily Manage Social Media Accounts
There are limits to what a social media marketer can do with a single social media account. A sticky proxy helps you bypass common social media limitations by creating new accounts from different IP addresses.
Users can access each account from one IP consistently without getting banned by robots. A sticky proxy can generate long browsing sessions, tricking host bots into thinking you're accessing the site from one IP. A common use for sticky proxies includes ad accounts, social media and sensitive payment gateways like Paypal.
2. Monitor E-commerce Deals Across Regions
E-commerce is growing, and so is the number of yearly promotions you won't want to miss out on. The downside to some of these deals is that they are only available to a specific region. A static proxy can be used to access region-specific deals.
Remarks: note that static proxies help eCommerce end users to avoid missing out on a particular deal. This shouldn't be mistaken for e-commerce price monitoring, a specific feature in rotating proxies.
3. Conduct Market Research
When comparing sticky vs. rotating proxies, sticky proxies are good for doing market research from one portal. Online repositories act as a good source of information centralized on one platform. Repositories can limit the number of accounts per user.
A sticky proxy server lets people create many accounts using a different IP address. Users can then log in to the accounts from a consistent proxy server.
4. Browse for Longer Periods
Like rotating proxies, sticky proxies can assume the connection of a typical residential user, allowing the session to last longer. You can choose from a 10, 20, to 30-minute session to access specific IP addresses without interruption.
5. Minimize Data Exchange
Sticky proxies provide session stickiness which minimizes processes of exchanging session information as in rotating sessions.
👎 Cons:
The downside of using sticky proxies is that it doesn't give you a dynamic pool of IP addresses. This makes it easy for intelligent bots to identify irregular usage patterns, blacklist the IP address and halt web scraping operations.
When To Use Rotating Proxies?
Do you get accounts banned? Are your workflows crashing in the middle of an operation? Perhaps it's time to leverage rotating sessions.
Rotating proxies use a backconnect technology to change connection ports for each session. Such IP rotation enhances anonymity, among many other advantages.
👍 Pros:
Some of its use cases include:
- Web scraping.
- Monitoring SEO.
- Sessions.
- Proxy variety.
- Anonymity.
- Generating leads.
- Navigate Cookie Tracking.
- E-commerce trend analysis.
1. Web Scraping
Scrapping from a single website gives unreliable and insufficient bits of data. What if we want to use data for comparison purposes? Instead of manually accessing many sites from different IPs, we can use different IP addresses from one proxy pool. As a result, users can generate averages, mean, median values and the most popular data types.
2. Monitoring SEO
Competitors' analysis is a big part of SEO; however some of these competitors can be in different geolocations, which affects location-specific keywords, SERP rankings, and much more. A rotating proxy can help users keep track of the competitors' ever-changing rank results to identify new SEO trends.
3. Sessions
A sticky proxy connects one server over long periods, which isn't ideal for many requests leading to spam. A rotating proxy generates continuous rotating sessions through new IP addresses per session.
4. Proxy Variety
Various kinds of rotating proxies overcome loopholes associated with sticky proxies.
5. Anonymity
VPNs use rotating proxies to access websites anonymously while maintaining personal privacy.
6. Lead Generation
Users can use rotating proxies to create custom rules to extract customer information like name, job title, email address and so on, without triggering a captcha or identity verification.
7. Navigate Cookie Tracking
AI can recognize common web scraping patterns. Cloud security usually involves a series of rules ranging from identity access management, firewalls, encryption, cookies and many more. A good rotating proxy provider will rotate from a wide pool of whitelisted IP addresses while creating a new connection.
8. E-commerce Benchmarking
The ideal use case is real-time monitoring of the performances of e-commerce products. Easily analyze data to find bestsellers, products with the most reviews, most performing niches, and much more.
👎 Cons:
The downside of a rotating proxy is that users might have to overcome javascript challenges from Bot detection systems. Some rotating proxy providers have a limited pool of IP addresses which increases the risk of getting blocked along the process.
How Do I Know Which Proxy to Use?
Let's get the confusion out of sticky vs. rotating proxy. The best proxy to use depends on the task you're looking to complete. Rotating proxies are perfect for scraping e-commerce websites, while sticky proxies are perfect for buying from a store in a different region.
Large-scale operations require a rotating proxy but choose a sticky proxy if you want to do a light social media scraping job.
What Proxy Pool Will Help You To Web Scrape?
The best proxy pools use whitelisted IP addresses to make fresh connections.
ZenRows has the best proxy pool. It's a web scraping API that includes Smart Rotating Proxies that handle all proxy management to save you time and avoid headaches. Test it out by taking advantage of the free trial available.
Conclusion
We have gone through the basics of sticky vs. rotating proxies. We discussed the differences, as well as the best use cases for each proxy. The proxy to use depends on the task type you want to complete.
As a quick reminder, sticky proxies are perfect for:
- Managing social media.
- Keeping tabs on products.
- Conducting market research.
While rotating proxies are perfect for:
- Web scraping.
- Monitoring SEO.
- Generating leads.
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