UK Residential IP – UK Residential Proxies that Work

If you need UK rotating proxies, there’s only a small number of proxy providers who can supply them especially if you need residential addresses. There’s lots of information in the post below but a great little company that are supply both geo-targeting and residential addresses is IPBurger – check them out here.

Most websites nowadays keep a careful eye on the IP addresses that connect to them. Whether it’s for geo-targeting reasons, fraud prevention or marketing then it’s safe to say every connection you make is recorded and logged almost instantly. Most of the time this is irrelevant to the ‘standard user’ however if you start making frequent requests from the same address you’ll get blocked very quickly.

Even huge websites like Google will only allow a certain amount of use in a specific period of time. If you exceed the limit you’ll get the ‘suspicious activity’ warning and have to wait or solve a captcha.

This block is surprisingly easy to trigger even by an individual searching manually. However if you’re using a shared connection, a proxy or some automated software for scraping results then it will happen constantly. Almost all websites have these limits, some are quite generous and others very intrusive. If you’re trying to gather or scrape a lot of data consistently it can be a huge challenge and one that’s not possible of solving from a single IP address.

Which is why for many tasks including scraping or automated requests then you must have access to lots of IP addresses. What’s more these addresses will need to be trusted and located in the correct location to match your requests. Spinning through a block of Russian IP addresses to scrape prices from a US airline isn’t going to get your far.

Reserving lots of IP addresses for your use only can also be expensive especially if you need lots of them for scraping. The bill goes even higher if you need them to be residential addresses from a specific location too! Which is why there’s now a thriving market in something called rotating proxies which can fulfil this need for lots of IP addresses for a short period of time.

Scraping What is It and Why Do People Do it ?

You’ve probably noticed that there’s an awful lot of data available on the internet. Lots of this is actually extremely valuable if you collect and filter this data for use in specific tasks. Indeed many people make a lot of money from web scraping – gathering up data and reselling it.

Here’s a couple of examples but remember the possibilities are virtually endless when you start really thinking about the sort of data that’s available and who might want it.

Price Comparison Sites – some of these are huge and massively profitable. All of them follow a simple model of collating prices and data from individual sources and presenting them in an easy format. Massive profits then can be made in advertising and through affiliate commissions. Most countries have many of these sites for things like insurance, finance and travel – if you live somewhere that doesn’t, there’s your opportunity.

Online Directories – can be very lucrative too, scaping data and contact information and compiling them into directories for users/customers to access. Money can be made from adverts, introduction fees to business or simply promoting specific businesses. Directories can be on virtually any sort of service, business or product.

Bots and apps – increasingly common, especially on mobile devices – software which automatically scrapes different websites and compiles data automatically. For example, you can create a bot for travellers who want to check different hotel or flight service and even other price comparison sites (scraping the scrapers!).

Sell Research Data – even freely available data is valuable if it’s collected, collated and presented to the right market. Many companies and businesses don’t have the resources or skills to gather data like this but will willingly pay for it. Find a niche on a specific product, service and gather data to sell on to interested parties. It’s actually easier than it sounds especially if you have some specific knowledge in a certain market.

Why You May Need US, European or UK Rotating Proxies

A proxy server is a gateway that you can filter web requests when retrieving data. They act as an intermediary between you and the information source you’re using. One of the major benefits is that it hides your real IP address as the website only sees the address of the proxy server – perfect for scraping data.

There are actually all sorts of different proxies which you can read up about on this site – check out residential proxies, data center proxies or Socks5 for a start. Almost every one can be combined with specific locations like the US and United Kingdom, depending on where you want your proxy servers to be located. So a UK proxy would be using a UK IP address, a US proxy a US address and so on. Having the right proxy address in the right locations is often the key to avoiding IP bans, which is why it’s important to find proxy service providers who can support multiple locations.

However one of the most useful are rotating proxies which are a great way for compiling huge amounts of data quickly and cheaply without getting blocked. The key to these is that your not limited to a specific location, or proxy network but can switch automatically from a central IP pool. Some large providers even have a proxy plan which allows you to switch between datacenter proxies and residential IPs on a single proxy port on each individual connection.

How Does a UK Rotating Proxy Service Work

A proxy server doesn’t have to be stuck with a single IP address that it uses every time. If it did, then it would get blocked in exactly the same way as everyone else does. However that proxy server sitting in a local data center can actually be configured to use specific pools of addresses from anywhere in the world, and switch between them at will.

A rotating proxy is simply a proxy server which assigns a new IP address from a proxy pool for each connection (or however it’s configured). So if you want to send 50 requests to a single web site, you can use 50 different IP addresses on each connection while using a rotating proxy. Those IP addresses in rotation can be from all sorts of sources and locations from all across the globe. This is perfect for avoiding blocks and enables you to remain completely anonymous when scraping data or content from these sites.

Most of the better services will allow automatic rotation so you can simply instruct your rotating proxy to switch IP addresses automatically. There’s little configuration involved with most of the services, if you want more control you’ll need to look at the more advanced services like Bright Data and their proxy manager dashboard.

Residential IP Address Proxies

Increasingly many web sites are differentiating between the classification of the incoming IP address. Most proxies and VPN services will use addresses from commercial or datacenter ranges, unfortunately most web sites know this. The probability that a commercial IP address is actually a proxy service is very high so many sites will automatically block or at least monitor carefully these addresses.

This is why IP addresses from residential ranges are becoming so important. These addresses are identical to those used by standard home users and are such almost impossible to block effectively. They’re not always essential for many sites but almost any e-commerce website will require residential addresses particularly if you want to process transactions. Online entrepreneurs who operate multiple accounts on sites like eBay, Ticketmaster and so on will almost always use residential proxies from specialist providers like IPBurger. With these companies you can sign up to a service with a proxy list comprised specifically with residential IP addresses.

If you’re not operating on any large scale or you have deep pockets, it’s perfectly possible to get proxy lists with dedicated residential IPs from some proxies providers. The success rate of such ranges is marginally more than shared IP addresses, but it’s difficult to justify the extra costs.

Conclusion – Using Rotating Proxies

Ultimately the main benefits for rotating proxies are scale and affordability especially for residential IP addresses. To gain exclusive access to thousands of dedicated residential IP addresses would cost a small fortune. However using a rotating proxy attached to a pool of residential IP addresses makes it much more cost effective. Sure you have to share the IP addresses with other users but most rotating proxies will ensure that IP addresses are not used concurrently.

These initial services were limited to standard data center addresses but now you can get rotating proxies for all sorts of different purposes. The two most useful features are to use residential addresses and to be able to specify the location. There’s not many companies who can provide both, but Luminati and IPBurger can offer these services if you need them. Both companies are reasonably priced and have great customer support.