Rotating IPs, and keeping one IP for a login or checkout

Coming soon. Residential isn't on sale yet, so you can't order it today. This page shows how it works, so you're ready when it lands. Need a proxy now? ISP and datacenter are on sale: see Residential, ISP or datacenter: which one do I need?.

Short version: residential rotates, so a new connection usually leaves from a different home IP. That's great for spreading requests out, and wrong for a login or a checkout that has to stay on one IP. For those, rent an ISP IP: it keeps one address for its whole term.

Rotating is right when

• every request stands alone, like pulling thousands of separate public pages;
• a site limits requests per IP and you want the load spread thin;
• nobody's checking whether this request came from the same place as the last.

When you need to keep one IP

• a login, a basket or a checkout is tied to the IP you started on;
• a page and the data calls it fires need to look like one visitor;
• you keep an account logged in for days.

Don't build these on residential and hope the address holds. The IP is someone's home connection, and it can drop off whenever their device goes offline. Use an ISP IP instead: it's yours for the whole term. See ISP proxies: what you get.

Need residential and one IP for a short flow anyway? Email support@proxymonkey.io before you build around it, and tell us what the flow does. Don't copy a session format from another provider's docs; it won't mean the same thing here.

The keep-alive gotcha

Most HTTP clients keep a connection open and reuse it, and a reused connection usually keeps its exit IP. So a rotating proxy can look sticky by accident. Want a fresh IP per request? Open a fresh connection each time. Reusing one connection can keep a few requests on one IP for a moment, but that isn't a promise.

Keep one cookie jar per IP, too: the same cookie turning up from several IPs looks worse than no cookie at all.

Check what you got

Ask an IP-echo service twice and compare:

curl -sS --proxy "http://HOST:PORT" --proxy-user 'USERNAME:PASSWORD' https://api.ipify.org; echo
curl -sS --proxy "http://HOST:PORT" --proxy-user 'USERNAME:PASSWORD' https://api.ipify.org; echo

Two separate commands are two connections, so you'll usually see two different IPs.

Not what you expected? Email support@proxymonkey.io with the command you ran (password removed) and the two IPs you got.