Best Web Scrapers

Practical Proxy Rotation Guide

Design rotation policies, health checks, and routing logic that keep large-scale crawls unblocked across geographies.

Best Web Scrapers Research· Network Operations Desk
Published
Published March 18, 2024
Updated
Updated March 18, 2024
Read time
1 min read

Rotating proxies prevents request bursts from appearing suspicious to target websites. The right mix of residential, mobile, and datacenter IPs depends on the sensitivity of the target and the type of content you collect.

Map requirements to proxy types

Use caseRecommended proxyNotes
Price monitoring on e-commerceResidentialPrioritise city-level targeting and session stickiness.
SERP monitoringDatacenter + SERP APICombine low-latency pools with APIs that return structured results.
App store intelligenceMobileRotate carrier and device to mimic organic traffic.

Implement adaptive routing

interface ProxyResult {
  status: number
  latency: number
  blocked: boolean
}

export function chooseNextProxy(history: ProxyResult[]): string {
  const healthy = history.filter((result) => result.latency < 4000 && !result.blocked)
  if (healthy.length === 0) {
    return 'residential-global'
  }

  const sorted = healthy.sort((a, b) => a.latency - b.latency)
  return sorted[0].status === 200 ? 'residential-regional' : 'datacenter-backup'
}

The router combines block signals with latency to keep crawls fast. Feed it with telemetry from your scraping jobs and fall back to dedicated SERP APIs when success rates dip below target.

Operational guardrails

  • Assign each crawl a rate-limit policy that caps requests per domain and per proxy.
  • Cache resolved DNS entries so you do not overload resolvers when rotating aggressively.
  • Test new proxy pools against staging environments before routing production traffic.
  • Keep an incident runbook that lists how to swap vendors, rotate credentials, and notify compliance teams.

With clear controls, teams can ship ambitious crawling roadmaps without compromising on stability or trust.

Frequently asked questions

How many proxies do I need for a crawl?
Budget at least one residential IP per 50 concurrent requests and monitor success rates so you can scale pools dynamically.
What metrics highlight proxy health?
Track connection latency, successful request percentage, error codes, and block signals such as captchas or forced logins.

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