Proxy Rotator

A proxy rotator is a server that gives you a new IP address from a large pool for every request, which means you can send many HTTP requests to an internet site and be seen as different clients.

An IP rotator service is a tool to help you hide your IP address when requesting content from web pages, allowing you to scrape internet content without being rate-limited or blocked. Definitely, essential for any developer interested in gathering data at scale.

A rotating proxy service is an intermediary server that assigns a different IP address for each new connection. That represents you can run a script to send thousands or even millions of requests to any number of sites while using different IPs, allowing you to web scrape effectively.

A proxy server for web scraping is a router that provides a gateway between developers' programs and external servers. Here we're talking about an intermediary that assigns your bot a new IP and changes it frequently.

A proxy server plays the role of an intermediary between your web server and the machines hosting external sites. A proxy server uses a different IP address on behalf of the user, replacing your real address with an IP address provided by the proxy server.

The best proxy server to use will depend on your goals and budget, and there are many available options. However, if your purpose is performing data extraction activities, a web scraping API like ZenRows is recommended because of its complementary tools to bypass any anti-bot measures.

Getting a proxy is easy. You first need to decide which type of proxy you need (residential is the most frequent recommendation for web scraping), then go for a traditional proxy service or a web scraping API, and you'll get instant access right away after subscribing. And in many cases, the providers offer a free trial. Check out our guide on proxies for web scraping.

The steps to get a proxy IP address are these:

1. Research the most popular services and decide what proxy type you're interested in.
2. Sign up for a free trial.
3. Test the quality and speed of the provided proxy IP.
4. Subscribe to the web scraping proxy rotator.

How to use a proxy rotator will depend on the service you end up choosing. As an approximation to developers, it's a great idea to check out an introductory guide to rotating proxies in Python.

To use a proxy server for web scraping, you have two options: either you add the proxy URLs to your code and develop the full logic in the case of traditional proxy service, or you use a quick implementation allowed by modern web scraping APIs that come with proxies.