Rotation, sticky sessions, and which to pick

Residential is coming soon and cannot be ordered yet. This page describes how it works. ISP and datacenter proxies are on sale now: see Residential, ISP or datacenter: picking the line for the job.

Residential rotates: the pool picks the exit, so your requests leave from changing IPs. Holding one residential exit across requests is not something we can promise today, so if a job needs one address held, the dependable answer is a static IP. ISP and datacenter IPs never rotate.

Rotation or one address: which fits

Rotation suits a job when:

• every request stands alone, such as collecting many separate public pages;
• you want the load spread over many addresses;
• the target does not care which address made the previous request.

You need one address held when:

• a login, a basket or a multi-step form is tied to the address you started from;
• a page and the data requests it triggers have to look like one visitor;
• you are debugging and need to repeat a request from the same place.

For those jobs, use a static IP: it keeps one address for the whole term you buy. See ISP proxies: static IPs on a carrier you name, or Datacenter proxies: fixed addresses for tolerant targets if the target accepts server traffic.

Sticky sessions on residential

There is no session setting on the residential proxy page, and we do not publish a session format. If your job needs residential exits held across requests, write to support@proxyhive.io with the proxy's ID and what the job needs, and a person will tell you what that proxy supports. Do not copy a session format from another provider's docs; it will not match.

Check what you are getting

Ask an IP-echo service twice through the same proxy and compare:

import requests

proxy = "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT"
seen = []
for _ in range(2):
    with requests.Session() as s:
        seen.append(s.get("https://api.ipify.org", proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=15).text)
print(seen)

Two different addresses mean the proxy is rotating.

One trap: many clients reuse an open connection, which can make a rotating proxy look sticky. The example opens a fresh session for each request for that reason.

If what you see does not match what you expect, send support@proxyhive.io the two addresses and the proxy URL with the password removed.