The Complete Guide to Buying and Using Rotating Proxies

Rotating proxies have become an indispensable tool for large-scale web scraping and automation. By automatically changing your IP address with each request, rotating proxies allow you to bypass blocks and restrictions to gather data at scale.

In this comprehensive 2500+ word guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about purchasing, integrating and maximizing rotating residential and datacenter proxies for web scraping and beyond. Whether you’re new to proxies or an experienced user, you’ll find tips and insights here to take your use of rotating proxies to the next level.

What Are Rotating Proxies?

Rotating proxies refers to proxy servers that automatically rotate the IP address used by a user. The main types of rotating proxy services include:

Residential rotating proxies – These proxies are based on real residential IP addresses from ISP networks. Each request is routed through a different residential IP address to provide high anonymity and avoid blocks.

Datacenter rotating proxies – As the name suggests, these proxies rotate different datacenter IPs with each request. They provide fast throughput for simple web scraping jobs.

Mobile rotating proxies – Mobile proxies rotate IP addresses assigned to cellular carriers, providing mobile-optimized IPs for tasks like app testing.

Rotating ISP proxies – Proxies that rotate within IP ranges belonging to specific Internet Service Providers. This localized rotation prevents wide ISP blocks.

Rotating Socks5 proxies – Variation of residential proxies that route traffic through rotating Socks5 proxy servers for added encryption.

The key benefit shared by all these proxies is the ability to automatically rotate your outward-facing IP address. By spreading requests across a large pool of IPs, you can avoid blocks while maximizing the number of requests.

Rotating proxies help you appear as many different users from different devices and locations. This prevents patterns in your traffic from being detected so you can gather more data with reduced risk of bans and CAPTCHAs.

Why Web Scrapers Need Rotating Proxies

Rotating proxies have become hugely popular for large-scale web scraping thanks to several key benefits:

Prevent IP bans – Repeatedly accessing sites from the same IP risks getting banned. Rotating proxies mitigate this by requesting from different IPs.

Bypass geographic restrictions – Sites like Amazon and Craigslist block scrapers from other countries. Proxies let you route requests through local IPs.

Overcome rate limits – Sites limit how many requests someone can make per hour/day. Rotating proxies bypass this by spreading requests across multiple IPs.

Solve captchas – Too many requests from an IP can trigger CAPTCHAs. Rotating proxies ensure CAPTCHAs are encountered less frequently.

Enhanced scalability – Proxies grant access to thousands of IPs, allowing you to make tens of millions of requests per day.

Improved data accuracy – Some sites serve different content based on visitor’s location. Rotating geographic IPs provides more accurate data.

Bottom line – rotating proxies let you gather orders of magnitude more data versus scraping without proxies. They are essential when building web scrapers that need to operate at very large scales.

Key Features of Wingate‘s Proxy Service

Now let’s take a look at some of the top features of Wingate’s rotating proxy offering:

Large IP Pools

Wingate provides access to millions of rotating IPs:

• 3,000,000 residential IPs from major ISP networks around the world
• 800,000 datacenter IPs hosted in Wingate‘s highspeed network infrastructure
• 400,000 mobile IPs spanning 700+ cellular carriers globally

These large pools ensure you never reuse the same IPs repeatedly. You can sustain very high request volumes without worrying about exhausting their proxy inventory.

Global Backconnects

Their global backconnect nodes intelligently route your traffic through different proxy pools:

• Location targeted – Route requests through proxies matching your target country, state or city.
• ISP targeted – Further targeting specific ISP networks avoids wide ISP blocks.
• ASN targeted – Target Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) for more granular blocking avoidance.
• Automatic load balancing – Requests are distributed evenly across backconnect nodes to prevent overloading.

Sophisticated backconnect technologies provide the location targeting needed for accurate web scraping.

Custom Rotation Configurations

You can customize IP rotation behavior based on your specific needs:

Finer grained rotation provides higher anonymity while stickier sessions maintain session continuity.

Integrations

Wingate provides official integration guides for popular languages, libraries and tools:

• Python – Requests, Selenium, Scrapy libraries
• Node.js – Native HTTP/HTTPS modules, Puppeteer
• PHP – cURL, Guzzle
• Apify – Proxy configuration for Apify web scraping platform
• ScrapeStack – Custom API integration for ScrapeStack scraper

Integrations make it seamless to add proxies across your scraping infrastructure.

Wingate vs. Top Competitors

How does Wingate compare against some of the top competing rotating proxy services? Here is an overview:

While proxy providers differ in their strengths, Wingate offers a compelling blend of affordable pricing with good performance, targeted backconnects, and helpful integrations.

Getting Started with Wingate Proxies

Ready to get started with Wingate? Here is a step-by-step guide to purchasing and using their proxies:

1. Select Your Plan

First, select one of Wingate‘s rotating proxy plans based on your needs:

The Starter plan is a good way to test the proxies. For larger scale scraping, the Professional or Enterprise plans provide more bandwidth, IPs and usage capabilities.

Wingate also offers Pay As You Go billing if you want to pay only for exactly the resources used each month.

2. Complete Checkout

Go through checkout and payment. Wingate accepts all major credit cards and PayPal.

You‘ll receive credentials for accessing your proxies immediately upon payment.

3. Configure Proxies

Use Wingate‘s configuration guides to set up proxies within your desired programming language or web scraping tool.

For example, here is sample code to work with Wingate proxies in Python by passing credentials to the Requests module:

import requests

proxy_host = ‘proxy.wingate.com‘
proxy_port = ‘22225‘
proxy_user = ‘MY_USERNAME‘
proxy_pass = ‘MY_PASSWORD‘

proxies = {
  ‘http‘: ‘http://{}:{}@{}:{}/‘.format(proxy_user, proxy_pass, proxy_host, proxy_port), 
  ‘https‘: ‘https://{}:{}@{}:{}/‘.format(proxy_user, proxy_pass, proxy_host, proxy_port)
}

response = requests.get(‘https://www.example.com‘, proxies=proxies) 

This allows all requests to tunnel through Wingate‘s proxy network.

4. Make Requests!

You‘re all set! You can now start making web scraping requests through Wingate‘s rotating proxies from your code.

See their documentation for details on targeting specific proxy countries, cities, ASNs etc. based on where you are scraping.

Choosing the Right Proxy Type

One key decision when purchasing rotating proxies is choosing between residential and datacenter proxy types. Let‘s discuss the distinguishing factors:

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are the go-to choice for most robust web scraping and automation tasks.

Key Advantages:

• IPs are from real devices so they mimic organic user traffic
• Ability to target specific cities, states, countries, ISPs, ASNs
• High success rates due to IP diversity and granular targeting

Use Cases:

• Accessing sites that block datacenter IPs
• Scraping sites like Amazon, Craigslist that restrict by geography
• Automating sneaker/ticket purchases that require realistic IPs
• Anti-fraud checks for creating accounts in multiple regions

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies offer blazing fast speed and simplicity, but lack fine-grained location targeting.

Key Advantages:

• Extremely fast connections with little latency
• Simpler IP management without geographic configurations
• Lower costs for very high volumes of requests

Use Cases:

• Scraping public data that doesn‘t require regional IP targeting
• Crawling a lot of simple sites quickly
• Running massive volumes of concurrent requests

Making the Choice

For most robust scraping where accuracy matters, residential proxies are preferred. The ability to target specific ISPs and locations provides a critical edge in avoiding blocks.

Datacenter proxies work well for aggregating lots of simple public data. Just be aware of their limitations when dealing with sites that restrict traffic by geography or actively block datacenters.

Wingate offers both proxy types so you can match each use case with the right proxy configuration.

Expert Tips for Maximizing Your Proxies

To conclude, here are some expert tips for getting the most value from your rotating proxies:

• Take advantage of sticky sessions to maintain access to sites that require session continuity vs just scraping public pages.

• Limit requests per IP to avoid exhausting IPs that enforce hidden quotas.

• Disable retry failures so you don‘t waste proxy IPs retrying on sites that will never work.

• Test proxy performance to filter out non-working IPs before running at scale.

• Debug failed requests by reviewing response codes to identify block pages and anti-bot mechanisms.

• Try residential and datacenter to see which provides higher success rates for your specific sites.

• Talk to support if you‘re having issues. They can help troubleshoot failures and optimize your scraping configuration.

And those are my top tips for maximizing success and scale when using Wingate‘s rotating proxies!

Conclusion

Rotating proxies serve an invaluable role in preventing blocks and enabling large-scale data extraction. Wingate provides one of the most compelling options for scraping-focused users needing lots of targeted IPs at an affordable price.

With over 3 million residential IPs and location-specific backconnects, Wingate proxies offer great flexibility to handle even very demanding scraping use cases. Their solid performance and helpful integrations make it easy to get set up scraping at scale.

So if you‘re ready to take your web scraping to the next level, we definitely recommend giving Wingate‘s rotating proxies a try! They provide an excellent blend of access, targeting and affordability.