Static Proxies And Rotating Proxies: What’s The Difference?

You might have noticed that proxy providers offer their clients either Static proxies or Rotating proxies and have asked yourself what’s the difference between the two?

In this article, we will discuss their differences and hopefully inform you which one you should use based on your needs.

What Are Static Proxies

Static proxies use a single IP address at a time unless you change it. Anytime you visit a different website, your IP address will never change. The types of proxies that use static proxies are only datacenter proxies and ISP proxies. When using static proxies, you’ll be given a set of different IP addresses that you can connect through.

What Are Rotating Proxies

Rotating proxies are proxies that continuously rotate IP addresses from a proxy pool. You can set the time interval in which an IP address rotates to another one.

Mobile proxies and residential proxies only use rotating proxies but datacenter and ISP proxies can also be configured to use rotating proxies.

When using rotating proxies, you’ll be given a single backconnect IP address that would give access to a proxy pool.

What Are Their Differences?

There are plenty of differences between static and rotating proxies, which mainly are:

• Proxy Rotation. Static proxies have no IP rotation while rotating proxies automatically alternate between multiple IP addresses.

• Speed. Static proxies have a strong internet connection and bandwidth while rotating proxies have varied connection speeds, which may sometimes be fast, slow, or average.

• Price. Pricing for static proxies are based on the number of IP addresses you want to purchase and rotating proxies are based on the amount of traffic you want to use.

• Exclusivity. With static proxies, you can use either shared or private IPs depending on what you need but you can only use shared IPs on rotating proxies.

• Flexibility. Using static proxies has little to no flexibility as you can’t change any parameter but with rotating proxies, you can easily change any parameter of the proxy server.

• Maintenance. You must carefully maintain static proxies as you only have access to a few IP addresses. Meanwhile, with rotating proxies, you can simply change to a new IP address if one is not working.

Conclusion

You can use either static proxies or rotating proxies, depending on what use case you need them for. Static proxies are best when you want to do tasks like managing multiple accounts, tasks where you would want the same identity.

You can achieve these by creating sticky sessions with residential IPs. Rotating proxies, on the other hand, are best when you want to do advanced tasks where you need to continuously change your identity and avoid bans.

For example tasks like, web scraping social media or e-commerce websites and even sneaker botting. You can check out Geonode’s static and rotating proxies!