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What Is a Rotating Proxy (Proxy Rotation)?

A rotating proxy changes the IP address your traffic leaves from, either on every request or after a set time, by drawing on a pool of IPs. Proxy rotation spreads your requests so that no single address carries much of the load.

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how it works

How proxy rotation works

There are two ways to rotate. With gateway rotation you connect to one host and port, a backconnect proxy, and the provider picks a new exit IP from its pool for each connection. Your code never changes; the rotation happens on the provider's side, and options such as country or session length go in the username.

With client-side rotation you hold a list of static proxies and your code picks a different one for each request, for example round robin or at random. This gives you full control over which IP hits which site, and works well with a set of dedicated ISP proxies.

Either way, rotation can be per request or time-based. Per request suits independent page loads. When several requests must come from the same IP, such as a login followed by a few pages, switch to a sticky session for that flow.

why it matters

Why proxy rotation matters for proxy users

Sites measure load per IP. Sending ten thousand requests from one address looks very different from sending a few each from thousands of addresses, and rotation keeps every IP within the request rate a normal visitor would produce. Rotation does not replace good manners: keep total request rates reasonable, honour 429 responses and cache what you have already fetched.

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Example: per-request rotation in Python

With a rotating gateway, the same proxy URL returns a new exit IP on each request. This prints the IP the target sees three times:

How to rotate proxies in Python covers client-side rotation over a list of static IPs.

CleanProxies rotating residential proxies rotate per request or hold sticky sessions from 5 minutes to 24 hours across a 50M+ IP pool, as low as $0.63 per GB.

Python requests through a rotating gatewayPython
import requests

PROXY = "http://USER:PASS@HOST:PORT"
proxies = {"http": PROXY, "https": PROXY}

for _ in range(3):
    r = requests.get("https://httpbin.org/ip", proxies=proxies, timeout=30)
    print(r.json()["origin"])

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Related terms

Terms that come up alongside Rotating proxy.

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Rotating proxy FAQs

Straight answers about Rotating proxy.

Proxy rotation means sending requests through different IP addresses over time, either automatically through a provider's gateway or by cycling through a list of proxies in your own code.

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