Sticky Sessions or Rotating Sessions?

It is becoming increasingly necessary to execute online operations using proxies. There are a few things everyone should bear in mind while scraping pricing from an e-retailer for comparison, creating a database for any purpose, or simply managing multiple social media accounts. Proxies are a vital part of most online business endeavors, and you must know how sessions work and what you should choose between sticky sessions or rotating sessions.

A proxy is the most crucial connection between sessions and online projects. They enable concurrent access to numerous websites or a single website. With sessions, you can fill out several forms at once to ensure consistent performance and scrape multiple data sets simultaneously.

What Are Web Sessions?

Every session has a unique data set that remains during the use of a website. When a user begins a new session, the browser is issued a unique identification. User interactions with a website link transfer the session ID to the server along with the HTTP request. The server remembers your user credentials and stores them for future sessions, allowing you to sign in automatically.

In each subsequent visit, the server exchanges the ID. Session details, including viewing history, input data, shopping cart contents, and so on, are saved on the server in a temporary directory and made visible to all pages on the visited site.

Rotating Sessions

Assume you have numerous pages of data that you wish to scrape rapidly. As a result, it generally takes some time, and using one IP address will almost certainly lead to numerous interruptions, from CAPTCHAs to bans. 

You may utilize rotating proxies to prevent such stumbling blocks and make the entire procedure as seamless as feasible. It is easy to exceed the number of requests you can send to a website and continue spinning until you have gotten all the data you need. Because of the greater flexibility, you may eliminate IP and session monitoring while avoiding bans.

Sessions that rotate IP addresses automatically do so after a certain period or with each connection request. A proxy rotator alternates between multiple IP addresses in a pool of rotating proxies, changing an IP address immediately with each new push on a link or page refresh.

Rotating sessions are best suited for basic scraping activities like extensive lists of product prices with several rows and pages. Rotation can accelerate operations involving no account login, such as web scraping and crawling. Rotating sessions are the ideal choice if you don’t want your ongoing requests associated with the same device and session.

For example, you can access a website with one IP address, but when you do anything else, like refreshing the website or clicking a new link, the IP address changes quickly. Check out our review on the top rotating proxy services available if you are seeking a rotating residential proxy provider.

Sticky Sessions

Consequently, session stickiness describes the situation where an IP address and proxy do not change over time while a session persists. Extended sessions are only as long as your proxy provider permits them to be. Some proxy services allow you to set the intervals between IP rotations. A session might take up to 30 minutes in most cases.

An IP change that occurs rapidly is indicative of an artificial, inorganic behavior, typically associated with automated bots. The web service may terminate the session as a result of such activities. Each monitored account gets its own and exclusive IP address, thereby isolating it from your primary individual account. Usually, one IP address manages a variety of prolonged sessions, with one IP per account.

When you access and maintain your accounts via the Internet, you need a single continuous session for the duration of the working cycle. Therefore, you can keep sticky sessions for a long time. Managing social media accounts, e-commerce platforms, and other account-dependent platforms is easy with sticky IPs.

This article looks at what static residential proxies are, how they work, and how they can be valuable for your specific business case if you would like to know more.

Static vs Rotating Proxies

Your choice depends on your requirements. Both types of proxies have advantages. Static proxies preserve the IP address even when you make new requests. However, the benefit of rotating proxies is that you receive a different IP address with each request. Both pros have their uses in certain instances. So let’s look at some examples of both types of use cases.

In some cases, changing IP addresses will put you back. Using static proxies allows social media administrators to stick with one IP. When someone enters their account using continually changing IP addresses, the social media platform will become suspicious and ban the profile.

Proxies that rotate are ideal for data collection. By using them, you will reduce the possibilities of bans or restrictions due to making too many queries from a single IP address. Rotation makes it simple to collect data for aggregating pricing, monitoring SEO, aggregating trips, and performing market research.

In general, static proxies are the best option if you need to use a single IP address for an extended period. Any automated operation that requires multiple IP addresses to achieve a specific goal can benefit from rotating proxies.

Conclusion

The web relies on sessions to provide users and service providers with a certain level of monitoring and customization. While rotating sessions are best suited for web scraping and automation, sticky sessions are better suited for account management and jobs with long working cycles.

Rotating proxies for automated operations such as scraping and testing comes with the advantage that the provider takes care of the rotation, leaving you free to focus on your goals. The use of static proxies, on the other hand, is sometimes still helpful.

Now you know when to use sticky sessions or rotating sessions. All that’s left for you to do is decide between static and rotating proxies.