Static vs Rotating Proxies

The difference is how long you keep an IP, and whether the provider or you decide when it changes.

Residential and mobile IPs from a rotating pool are never yours for a term: the longest you can hold one is a sticky session. A truly static IP comes from a datacenter or ISP (static residential) product, which is why ISP proxies exist: an ISP-registered IP that stays yours for 30 days at a time.

Rotate when you collect data from many pages; stay static when you act as one user over time.

Sites tie a login to more than a cookie. The OWASP Session Management Cheat Sheet recommends binding a session to client properties "such as the client IP address" and treating a change in the middle of a session as an anomaly that can raise an alert or end the session. So an account that sees its IP jump on every request gets logged out or asked to verify again.

• Best: one static IP per account. A dedicated ISP IP stays the same for its 30-day term and you renew it yourself: from $2.29 per IP, one price for any quantity. Never share one IP between accounts.
• Good: one long sticky session per account. Add -session-<id>-ttl-<seconds> to the username; ProxyField holds the IP from 30 s up to 36 h (129,600 s), 20 minutes if you set a session without ttl. Use a different session id for each account.
• Know the limits of sticky. An IP idle for 120 s gets a new IP, and if its exit node drops, the gateway retries once with a new session, so the IP may change. A sticky session borrows an IP from the pool; a static IP is rented to you. More in sticky vs rotating proxy sessions.

A static IP does not guarantee a login on its own: sites also check the browser fingerprint, cookies and how the account behaves. Keep each account's IP, country, browser profile and cookies together; see proxies for social media. Managing your own or your clients' accounts is allowed, one sticky or ISP IP per account; fake accounts and fake engagement are not.

A static proxy is an IP address assigned to you that does not change until your term ends. You connect to it by its own address and port, and every request leaves from it. Static proxies are usually dedicated datacenter IPs, or ISP proxies (static residential), which are registered to internet providers so that sites see an ISP customer. The difference between those two is covered in ISP vs residential proxies, and buying them in private proxies.

"Static", "dedicated" and "private" overlap but are not the same: static describes time (the IP does not change), dedicated describes sharing (only you use it). Most static proxies are sold as dedicated; see shared vs private vs dedicated proxies.

A rotating proxy is a gateway in front of a pool of IPs. You send every request to one address, and the gateway forwards each request, or each session, through a different IP from the pool. Your code never handles a list of IPs; the rotation happens on the provider's side.

At ProxyField, the gateway is gate.proxyfield.io:7000 for HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. It can pick a new residential or mobile IP for every request, or, with a sticky session, keep the same IP for 30 s to 36 h (presets 1, 5, 10 and 30 min, 1, 3 and 6 h). You can target a country, region or city, and the rotation stays inside that location. More on the product in rotating proxies.

IP rotation means changing the IP address your requests come from, so that no single address sends enough traffic to look automated. There are three common ways to do it:

A quick check of both modes. Expect three different IPs from the first loop and the same IP three times from the second:

import requests

def ip(proxy):
    return requests.get("https://api.ipify.org",
                        proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=30).text

rotating = "http://<login>:<password>@gate.proxyfield.io:7000"
sticky = "http://<login>-country-us-city-new_york-session-acct1-ttl-3600:<password>@gate.proxyfield.io:7000"

print([ip(rotating) for _ in range(3)])   # a different IP each time
print([ip(sticky) for _ in range(3)])     # the same New York IP for up to 1 hour

The username takes the target and the session after the login: -country-<cc>, -region-<region>, -city-<city>, -session-<id> and -ttl-<seconds> (30 to 129,600), lowercase with underscores, as in <login>-country-us-region-new_york-city-new_york-session-he9f2qga-ttl-600. Every part after the login is optional.

Static proxies

• Pros: the same identity every time, so logins and allowlists keep working; predictable speed, especially on datacenter and ISP IPs; a fixed price per IP for each 30-day term.
• Cons: one IP carries all your traffic, so a busy scraper gets it rate-limited or flagged; one location per IP; you replace a burned IP yourself.

Rotating proxies

• Pros: requests spread over many IPs, so each carries little traffic; many countries and cities from one endpoint; no list to maintain; per-GB pricing grows with the job.
• Cons: a site that ties a login or a cart to an IP can log you out when the IP changes; per-IP speed varies on home and mobile connections.

A rotation strategy decides when an IP changes. Match it to how the target tracks visitors:

• Every request for independent pages, such as product or search pages with no login.
• Per task with a sticky session when pages depend on each other: keep one IP from the first page of a search to the last page of results, then start a new session.
• Per account when you manage logins: one static or sticky IP per account, never shared between accounts.
• On block as a safety net: when a request returns 403, 429 or a CAPTCHA page, retry it on a new IP after a pause, and slow down if blocks keep coming.

Rotation is not the whole defense. Sites also look at headers, cookies, browser fingerprints and request rates, so a rotating proxy with a bot-like request pattern still gets blocked: how to avoid getting blocked while scraping.

Rotation itself costs almost nothing: the gateway picks an IP in milliseconds. The speed difference comes from the IP type. Static datacenter IPs run on server connections and are usually the fastest, and ISP IPs are usually close; rotating residential and mobile IPs depend on home and carrier connections. ProxyField residential proxies have an under 1 s typical response, according to our service data.

Need a new IP on every request? ProxyField residential proxies rotate across 412M+ IPs in 195+ countries, or hold one IP for up to 36 h, from $1.95/GB with no subscription. Start with the Easy Trial: 1 GB for $2.95. Traffic never expires, and all purchases are final.