How IP Hopping Can Help You Bounce Your IP Address

IP hopping is the practice of using one IP address for a little while and then changing it to another one. IP hopping or IP bouncing lets you avoid flags and bans. It is an important part of many online services.

In academia, IP hopping is a defensive mechanism that obscures data exchange. It does that by distributing packages to multiple connections. In this article, we will not be talking about this type of IP hopping or IP Fast hopping. You can read the US patent for IP hopping in data security here. Instead, we are examining another type of IP hopping – the change of sets of IP addresses.

Hopping from one IP to the next might seem easy – all you need is a proxy address and you’re set to go, but this usually is not the case. IP hopping is often used in automation and data intelligence. The person or company doing the IP hopping likely sends thousands of connection requests. A single proxy would never suffice.

This is why IP hopping needs a huge number of proxies in practice. Residential proxies are the best for IP hopping, because they are unique addresses from various locations and ISPs. These features let them remain undetected and screen scrape or crawl pages with maximum efficiency.

IP hopping in practice

Bouncing IP addresses in a single country

Bouncing an IP address brings risks: if a site detects unusual IP changes for the same user or account, it might ban the user. This often happens with inexperienced IP bouncers, because they forget to clear their cookies before bouncing to a new IP address. To prevent this, we advise an additional precaution – only using IPs in the same country.

If you want to bounce IP address in the same country, you can use a backconnect node for that exact country. It works in the same way as our whole proxy network, with the only difference being that it lets you access only a specific geo-targeted pool. Thus you can bounce between proxies only in New York, for example.

Do you need IP hopping software?

NO! Our rotating proxy network lets you bounce IP addresses with every connection or at a fixed time interval. You can use millions of residential proxies with any script, bot, browser or smart phone, including your iPhone.

If you need to check if your bounced IP is working as it should, we made this tutorial for you.

Why Use IP Hopping

There are several key reasons why you may want to use IP hopping:

Avoid bans and limits: Many websites enforce limits or bans based on IP addresses. By frequently changing your IP, you can avoid running into these restrictions. This is especially useful for web scraping or accessing APIs with rate limits.
Stay anonymous: IP addresses can be used to identify and track users online. IP hopping helps you maintain your anonymity by not using one persistent identifier.
Access geo-restricted content: Some content on the web is only available in certain countries or regions. IP hopping lets you easily switch your virtual location to access this geo-restricted content.
Scale requests: Scaling up requests usually requires a pool of many different IP addresses. With IP hopping, you can efficiently distribute these requests across a large, rotating mix of IPs.
Reduce block rates: Rapidly reusing the same IP for scraping or automation is more likely to get blocked. Spreading requests out across frequently changed IPs can help lower block rates.
Test from different locations: Developers may want to check how their website or app looks from different locations. IP hopping provides an easy way to test from many geographic vantage points.

How to Implement IP Hopping

There are a couple common techniques used to implement IP hopping:

Proxy Servers

The easiest approach is to use proxy servers that provide many different IP addresses you can quickly rotate through. Residential proxy services like SmartProxy are ideal for this, offering millions of IPs to hop between.

To hop IPs, you just need to update your proxy settings (e.g. via API) before each request to use the next random proxy. This handles the IP rotation for you automatically.

Cloud Hosts

Another option is to leverage cloud hosting providers that let you rapidly spin up and terminate instances. For example, you could create a script that launches new AWS EC2 machines, makes requests from their IPs, then terminates them.

The downside is this can get complex and expensive to manage many instances. It also typically provides data center rather than residential IPs.

Router Firmware

For hopping different IPs on your local network, you can use open source router firmware like OpenWrt. This lets you script changing the MAC address to cycle through IP leases from your ISP.

However, this method is very limited in the number of usable IPs you can obtain. It also doesn‘t help rotate your public IP address.

When to Use IP Hopping

Here are some of the most common use cases where employing IP hopping is beneficial:

Web Scraping

One of the most frequent uses of IP hopping is for large-scale web scraping. By rotating different residential IPs, you can scrape massive amounts of data while avoiding blocks and bans.

This technique is leveraged by data mining firms, price monitoring sites, search engines, and other data-driven companies.

Accessing APIs

Many APIs have usage limits based on IP address, like only allowing X calls per IP per day/minute. IP hopping lets you break through these restrictive caps to make as many API calls as you need.

Marketing analytics companies, financial firms, and travel meta search engines frequently use this tactic.

App Testing

Mobile app developers often want to test their iOS or Android apps across a diverse range of IP addresses and geographic locations.

With IP hopping via residential proxies, they can efficiently test from different regions, carriers, and network conditions.

Ad Verification

Online ad verification involves "clicking" and analyzing ads from many different IPs and user agents. This helps detect fraudulent traffic and ensure ads render properly.

By leveraging IP hopping, ad verification services can simulate clicks more realistically across a large spectrum of user profiles and devices.

Price Monitoring

Ecommerce price monitoring tools track pricing info across thousands of online retailers. To avoid getting blocked while scraping so many sites, they use IP hopping to constantly rotate IPs.

This enables smoothly gathering pricing data from a wide range of merchants over time.

Betting & Gaming

On betting and gaming sites, users wanting to place large aggregate bets will IP hop to avoid rejection, individual stake limits, and other restrictions.

Hopping different IPs simulates natural user behavior and helps circumvent betting caps. The same tactic applies to daily fantasy sports players entering contests.

IP Hopping Best Practices

If you plan to implement IP hopping, following these tips will help maximize effectiveness and avoid issues:

Use a proxy service with a large, frequently updated pool of residential IP addresses. This ensures you have enough unique IPs to keep hopping smoothly.
Rotate IPs randomly, not sequentially. This better mimics natural browsing behavior compared to going through IPs in a predictable pattern.
Clear cookies between IP hops or use cookie-less sessions. You want to avoid cookies linking activities across different IPs.
Set the TTL low on DNS lookups when hopping IPs. This prevents DNS caching from exposing your IP hopping.
Make request rates look natural across different IPs. Rapid bursts from a single IP at a time can appear bot-like.
Monitor IP performance and reuse factors. Retire IPs that get blocked frequently or see too much duplicate use.
Avoid having many IPs from the same subnets/ASNs. This diversity makes your traffic less distinguishable from normal users.
Implement delays between IP hops and add randomness to request timing in general. This makes activity human-like.

IP Hopping Tools

To make IP hopping easier, there are APIs and proxy manager tools that provide key features:

ProxyManager

ProxyManager makes it simple to handle large residential proxy pools for IP hopping. It provides intuitive UIs and APIs to mass control and monitor your proxy servers.

The service supports intelligently rotating and load balancing IPs as well as automatically detecting and disabling banned/stale IPs. This automation handles much of the proxy ops workload for you.

Luminati Proxy Manager

Luminati offers a proxy manager tool dedicated to their residential proxy service. It provides APIs for proxy rotation along with monitoring proxy stats and locations.

Their proxy panel also allows setting advanced rules to customize proxy usage. You can filter proxies by ASN, Geo, ISP, usage count, and more.

SmartProxy Manager

For using SmartProxy, they provide a simple Proxy Manager app. It has an intuitive UI for viewing proxy status, locations, and groups as well as adding whitelists/blacklists.

Their proxy manager APIs also enable automation for IP rotation, load balancing, and whitelist/blacklist control. This provides the key capabilities needed for efficient IP hopping.

ScrapeStack APIs

ScrapeStack is another residential proxy provider with APIs to support IP hopping. Their APIs allow cycling through their proxy IPs using a round-robin or random scheme.

They also offer proxies in sticky sessions which always reuse the same IP for a given session cookie. This helps avoid mixing IPs for a particular browser or device.

Webshare Proxy Panel

An alternative is Webshare which has a full-featured proxy panel that works across different providers including Stormproxies and GeoSurf.

It provides proxy grouping, rotation settings, and ban management capabilities on top of monitoring and statistics for proxies. All critical components for smoothly cycling IPs.

Key Takeaways on IP Hopping

IP hopping refers to frequently rotating the source IP used for making requests or connections. It is commonly used to avoid blocks, restrictions, and detection.
Residential proxies are the most effective for IP hopping since they offer a large, diverse pool of IP addresses from real homes and mobile devices across the world.
By hopping IPs with each request, you can obscure your traffic, bypass usage limits, access more geo-restricted content, and lower block rates for web scraping, automation, testing, and other uses cases.
To implement IP hopping, proxy manager tools and proxy API integrations make it easy to programmatically rotate IPs with each new request or connection.
For best results, make sure to randomize IPs, clear cookies, simulate natural behavior, monitor IP performance, and use large proxy pools from a variety of subnets and ASNs.

With the right approach, IP hopping provides a powerful technique to overcome a wide range of internet restrictions. The key is having an intelligent system capable of cycling through a large number of quality residential IPs across many networks and regions worldwide.