Rotating Vs. Static Mobile Proxies

Planning and running a web scraping operation to extract top-grade data from multiple sources isn’t simple. It requires a lot of preparation and readiness to address the scraping challenges and overcome obstacles that may prevent your scraper bots from fetching the desired information.

That’s where proxies come into the picture. Proxies ensure safe internet connections to help your scraping bots avoid getting blocked. Because of that, you should think twice when selecting the correct type of proxy for your specific needs, even more so if we’re talking about mobile proxies.

Today, we’ll discuss mobile proxies, how they differ from regular proxy servers, and everything else you should know about them.

What are mobile proxies?

A mobile proxy is a type of proxy server that uses a 3G, 4G, or 5G phone network to establish an internet connection. A mobile proxy server acts as a gateway between your mobile device and the web. In other words, it uses your mobile device to provide an intermediate web connection and connect your phone or tablet to the internet.

How do they work?

Mobile proxies are tablets, smartphones, or any portable device with a 3G, 4G, or 5G mobile data plan and compatible SIM card. Unlike regular proxies that require dedicated proxy servers to work, mobile proxies are real-life devices used by real-life users. Because of that, mobile proxies can gain access to various top-grade data sources by appearing as real Internet users.

Differences between mobile and other proxies

Due to their genuine activity and organic appearance, mobile proxies are often compared to regular proxies, such as datacenter and residential proxies. However, mobile and residential proxies are quite different. Residential proxies are tied to servers stored in a physical location, whereas mobile proxies do not require a physical location to operate.

In addition, the location of mobile proxies is constantly changing and shifting. Another difference is that mobile proxies get significantly faster than regular proxy servers due to access to 4G and 5G networks.

Types of mobile proxies

There are two types of mobile proxies – static and rotating. A rotating mobile proxy uses mobile devices with cellular network connections to give you access to a pool of rotating IP addresses. You can set random or fixed time intervals for interchanging rotating IPs to automatically switch between multiple IP addresses and make every connection appear as genuine as possible.

Because of that, rotating mobile proxies are perfect for use cases such as multi-accounting, market research, web scraping, and ad verification. Static or sticky mobile proxies, on the other hand, allow you to connect to the internet using a single unique (datacenter) IP address.

Because of that, sticky mobile proxies are ideal for increasing online anonymity, ensuring good bandwidth and top speed. Sticky mobile proxies are ideal for use cases like managing multiple social media accounts, avoiding IP bans, and extracting consistent data from a specific data source of web location while adjusting to the ever-changing nature of websites and online data.

Pros and cons of rotating and static mobile proxies

Rotating mobile proxies are ideal for:

• Improving online security and anonymity – by constantly rotating your IP, you prevent third parties, hackers, and trackers from monitoring your online activities and launching cyber attacks;
• Overcoming CAPTCHAs and IP blocks – sending requests with fresh IP addresses significantly lowers the risk of getting banned from the target websites;
• Sending millions of requests without getting flagged or banned – these proxies give you access to an abundant pool of IP addresses, allowing you to seamlessly scale your scraping operations by routing your traffic via different IPs.

Other benefits of using such proxies include gathering market intelligence, automating sneaker copping, managing multiple social media accounts, review and price monitoring, etc.

Static mobile proxies are a better solution than rotating proxies if you need to retain the same IP address for longer scraping sessions. They are also more reliable if you regularly revisit the same website or web page.

However, static mobile proxies only assign one sticky IP per request. Because of that, they aren’t the best solution for large-scale scraping operations.

Conclusion

You’ve learned what static and rotating mobile proxies are, how they work, and how they differ. Each proxy type is ideal for a specific set of use cases and can fetch you top-class data from an array of target websites.

The latter are more suitable for launching large-scale scraping projects. In contrast, static mobile proxies are a better fit for retargeting the same website or page over a longer period. Since both proxy types have their strengths and weaknesses, choose carefully to ensure you make an informed decision.