Rotating vs sticky residential proxy sessions: how to choose, with Python examples

Disclosure: this post comes from the Shifter team. Shifter is a residential proxy provider, and the examples use its gateway, but the ideas apply to any provider that lets you choose how long you keep an exit IP. When you send traffic through a residential proxy gateway, you get an exit IP from a large pool. The first decision is simple: should the next request come from a new IP, or from the same one as the last request? That is the difference between a rotating session and a sticky session. When to rotate Use a fresh IP for every request when requests do not depend on each other. Typical cases: Fetching many independent pages, such as product pages or search result pages. Collecting public data across a long list of URLs. Any job where no cookie or login state has to survive between requests. Spreading independent requests over many IPs keeps the request rate per IP low, which is what most sites look at first. When to stick Keep the same IP for a while wh