Rotating Proxies have been gaining popularity the last few years. It’s not because they are easier to use – they are often harder to use, especially if you need automation and must use the proxy provider’s API. And it’s not because they are cheaper either – rotating proxies are even more expensive that regular dedicated proxies, which are already pricier than their shared proxies counterpart. So what exactly is the deal with rotating proxies being so popular?
Best in their Class Rotating Proxies of 2023:
OxyLabs: The most Total IP Addresses
- Metered Prices based on Gigabytes of use
- 100m Residential Proxy IPs, 20m Mobile IPs
- Proxies Rotate per Proxy Request
- 195 Countries for Residential/Mobile Plans
OxyLabs has been around since 2017 when they just provided dedicated datacenter proxies, but recently they expanded their proxy network to provide residential and mobile IP addresses as well. Their services are marketed heavily toward web scraping and data mining, which they provide many tools and APIs for – but with so many IP addresses under their control, OxyLabs can be used for anything requiring proxies.
OxyLabs Promo Codes:
Bright Data – The Most Advanced Rotating Proxies
- Metered Connection – Pay for Gigabytes used, and IPs on Datacenter/ISP
- 72m Total Residential IPs, 700k Datacenter, 600k ISP, 7m Mobile
- Proxy Rotation per Request, Timed Interval, or Status Code
- 195 Countries for Residential/Mobile, 95 Datacenter, 35 ISP
Bright Data, formerly Luminati, is a relatively new proxy provider compared to some of the others in this list. They offer Datacenter, Residential, ISP, and Mobile IP rotating proxies. Bright Data proxies aren’t the cheapest available, but they come with a bunch of scraping and proxy management tools along with a highly advanced API that might be a bit overwhelming to new users.
Bright Data Promo Codes:
StormProxies – The Best Dedicated Rotating Proxies:
- Unmetered Connection – Unlimited Bandwidth
- 200k Dedicated IPs, 70k Residential
- Rotation per Request or Timed (3-15min)
- USA, EU, USA+EU, or Worldwide Proxy Pool
StormProxies has been around in it’s current form since 2015 selling proxies to SEO and SEM Specialists. Recently their website has started marketing more toward Shoe/Sneaker botters, but their Dedicated Rotating Proxies are still the best around for the price. They are a bit tight-gripped on their IP authorization whitelist, allowing just 1 Auth IP for Residential Rotating and only up to 4 Auth IPs on Dedicated Rotating Proxies.
Storm Proxies Promo Codes:
Rayobyte – The Best United States Rotating Proxies:
- Unmetered Datacenter & Metered Residential/Mobile Rotating proxies
- 10,000,000 Residential IPs, Less for Mobile and Datacenter
- Rotation per Request or Static – IP and User/Pass Auth
- 27 Countries for Residential/Mobile, 4 Datacenter Countries
Rayobyte, formerly Blazing Proxies by Blazing SEO LLC, has been selling proxies to users for SEO/SEM purposes since 2015, and they put a real focus on having top-tier servers and fast proxy speeds. Because of this, Rayobyte has ended up having one of the strongest networks of United States proxy servers, and therefore Rayobyte is the best choice when it comes to having the best U.S. Rotating Proxies. They offer metered Residential and Mobile Rotatin proxies sold per Gigabyte used as well as unmetered Datacenter Rotating Proxies sold per IP address quantity.
Rayobyte Promo Codes:
- Rayobyte Promo Code – 5% Recurring Discount on Monthly Proxy Plans
- Rayobyte Promo Code – 10% Discount
Shifter – The Best Unlimited Bandwidth Rotating Proxies
- Metered Connection – Price based on Gigabytes used
- 31,000,000 Total IP Addresses in PRoxy Pool
- Times Proxy Rotation – 5 to 60 minutes
- Worldwide Proxy Coverage
Shifter, formerly known as Microleaves, has been providing online proxy services since 2015. Their prices in the pricing table may seem a bit out of the loop, but it’s because their services aren’t quite sold the same as other rotating proxy providers. Their “Unlimited Bandwidth” rotating proxies actually have a 40Gb per port limit which is why they’ve been listed here as metered instead of unmetered and have a Price/Gb data column instead of a Price/IP column. Shifter allows unlimited use of their IP pool over a certain amount of ports (which is how you set proxy rotation and geo-targeting rules) with 40Gb of bandwidth per port and a 150 concurrent thread (connection) limit per port.
Shifter Promo Codes:
- Shifter Promo Code – 20% Off ANY Shifter Proxy Plan
- Shifter Promo Code – 20% Discount on Residential ISP Proxies
SmartProxy
- Metered Connection – Pricing based on Gigabytes Used
- 40,000,000 Residential IPs – 40,000 Datacenter IPs
- Time based Rotation – Up to 30 minutes
- 195 Residential Countries – U.S. Datacenter proxies
Smartproxy has been operating in its current form since 2019 providing many proxy services including rotating proxies. Like many of the other providers in this comparison their main focus is data scraping and SEO crawling, but they also market their services toward social media account creation and sneaker/ATC bots. Smartproxy has some of the cheapest prices for rotating proxies so they’re definitely worth checking out.
Soax
- Metered Prices per Gigabytes used
- 8,500,000 IP Addresses in Total
- Proxy Rotation is Request based
- 185 Countries covered by proxies
Soax is a very new rotating proxy provider, having only been around since early 2020. However, their proxy network is already very extensive for the small amount of time they’ve been operating. They have great prices for rotating proxies that compare nicely with some of their largest competitors. Soax is definitely worth checking out, especially if you’ve had a bad experience with some of the other rotating proxy providers on this list.
RotatingProxies
- Unmetered Bandwidth – Priced per IP used
- Unknown amount of Total IP Addresses
- Proxies Rotate every 5 Minutes
- USA Rotating Proxies
RotatingProxies Promo Codes:
ProxyRack – Last Resort Rotating Proxies:
ProxyRack has been providing rotating proxies since 2012 and had many happy customers. However, the gem of ProxyRack’s services was their rotating proxies with Residential IP addresses, which are the best Residential Rotating Proxies on the market, but ProxyRack told me they were having issues with customer retention. So basically they admitted that people use them for a month and then cancel service. Your mileage may vary…
CoolProxies – Cheap Shared Rotating Proxies in Canada
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 100Mb/s Connection
- Rotation per Request
- IP Authorization
CoolProxies has been around for a long time, since 2012, selling proxy services on SEO/SEM forums like BlackHatWorld and WarriorForum. They have a good track record and offer the best prices for Shared Rotating Proxies in Canada.
Cool Proxies Promo Codes:
- Cool Proxies Promo Code – 20% Discount on Proxies
- Cool Proxies Promo Code – 10% Recurring Discount on Proxies
Why Choose Rotating Proxies?
At first, people didn’t really see the need for rotating proxies. However, web developers and SEO specialists have recently realized that rotating proxies really shine when being used to scrape Google search engine result pages (SERPs). Keeping up with where your website, and competitor websites, rank in Google search results is a big part of being an SEO specialist. Google gives “captchas” to IP addresses that search too much too often, and even outright bans them some times, so rotating proxies are perfect for not catching the Google ban hammer.
Rotating proxies are also the choice proxies when spider/crawling competitor websites to create an index of their backlinks and keywords, which is the key to formulating SEO strategies to knocking them down in the Google search rankings. Most websites will ban or throttle an IP address that is running through all their pages too fast in order to create an index of them, so in order to thwart this, the pages must be crawled very slowly or proxies must be used. The problem with proxies is that large websites can have thousands and thousands of pages, so having just 10 to 50 proxies will still make things go pretty slowly and if you push too hard then even your proxies can get throttled or blocked by the site. It’s much easier, and faster, to get rotating proxies that will use a new IP from a pool of thousands of IP addresses to crawl each page of the competitor website for building the index of the site instead.
Another way rotating proxies have gained some traction recently is their use by online shopping/sneaker site botters. For years now sneaker heads and other high-end clothing connoisseurs have been using standard dedicated proxies to run bots that automatically add items to their online shopping carts and then use pre-loaded credit card numbers to quickly check out before stocks run out. However, clothing and sneaker retailers began catching on and started throttling and banning IP addresses of people using proxies and even IP addresses that were making too many purchases in a short amount of time. To combat this the botters started using rotating proxies that end up being a different IP address for each transaction – the coveted residential IP rotating proxies are even better for the botters because it’s even harder for retail websites to know a proxy is being used.
The Difference Between Rotating Proxy Services
Rotating Proxies are generally sold two different ways – Metered Connections, and Unlimited Bandwidth. Here’s a brief explanation of each style of rotating proxy plan.
Rotating Proxy Unlimited Bandwidth Plans
Unlimited rotating proxy plans give users a set amount of proxy IP “Ports” that can be used simultaneously for a certain fee and the price does not increase depending on gigabytes of bandwidth used. Users will have a smaller amount of proxy IPs to rotate between at one time, but data use is not metered. Unlimited Bandwidth rotating proxies are great for when lots of bandwidth will be consumed but not as many IP addresses are required – such as Webpage Spidering, Image/File Downloading, and Game Botting.
Rotating Proxy Metered Connection Plans
Metered rotating proxy plans give users unlimited access ports to the providers entire proxy ip pool while pricing is based on the amount of bandwidth in Gigabytes and the amount of proxy IPs used. Initial payment covers a certain amount of bandwidth and IPs to be used and will only increase if those limits are exceeded. Rotating Proxy metered connections are great when lots of IP addresses are needed but not a lot of bandwidth will be used – such as Data Minig, SERP scraping, Social Media Account Creation, and Sneaker/ATC Bots.
To learn more about how rotating proxies work, check out this article called What are Backconnect Proxies?
