How Many Proxies per Task Do I Need?

The purpose of a proxy server is to keep your online activity private by replacing your IP address and other potentially sensitive information with its own. Specifically, a proxy is a device with an internet connection and an IP address it uses for performing online tasks on your behalf.

Depending on your specific usage scenario, you might wonder how many proxies per task you need. Although there’s no clear answer to this question, we’ll provide some insight and cover the best practices for different tasks. Obviously, having more proxies at your disposal is better, but that’s not true in every case. Certain tasks require multiple proxies, while others need only one.

How Many Proxies per Task to Use in Different Scenarios

As stated earlier, the most straightforward answer to this question is “It depends.” However, you can get significantly closer to a more definitive answer if you know what you’ll use your proxies for. You can use proxy servers for all kinds of online activity, and we can split these into two basic categories.

Activities That Require More Proxies per Task

It’s always a good idea to have more proxies available regardless of the task you plan to use them for. If it’s web scraping, SEO crawling, or market research, more is always better. Certain websites have advanced proxy detection measures and can ban all your IP addresses at once.

In this scenario, you’ll have to stop using these proxies and switch to new ones, which can be a problem. If a proxy provider offers a limited number of IPs without any proxy rotation options, you might have to ask for new IPs or wait until the provider changes them. Obviously, this limitation can stop your scraping activity and introduce significant delays.

To conclude, if you aim to scrape data or use automation for your social media accounts , access to a large number of proxies is always a good idea. These tasks involve bots that send many requests in a very short period. The amount of requests is significantly higher than what a human user would send, so they’re easy to detect if they come from a small number of IPs.

Rotating proxies “spread” this activity over multiple IP addresses. Consequently, linking these requests to the same source becomes significantly harder, if not impossible. IPRoyal offers advanced rotating proxies you can switch on each request or after a specific period (up to 24 hours). This functionality ensures that our proxies work just the right way to keep your activity under the radar.

Activities That Require Fewer Proxies per Task

On the other hand, using many proxies per task can be completely unnecessary. Certain proxy users don’t have elaborate scraping operations and automation setups. If you’re just trying to bypass geo-restrictions and browse privately, one IP address (in the right location) is enough.

If you’re using sneaker bots to cop some kicks or automate some other type of purchase online, then having just a few proxies at your disposal is perfectly fine. Still, that depends on the number of purchases you plan to make. Generally, these tasks only need one IP address per task. Just remember that running multiple copping tasks from a single IP address is a bad idea.

How to Pick the Best Proxies for Your Tasks

The quality of proxies you use is just as important as the number of proxies you have at your disposal. Obviously, it’s essential that you use proxy servers that can guarantee high uptime, speeds, and efficiency. The answer to this question always comes down to using free vs. paid proxy servers.

While premium proxy servers are usually reserved for one user, free proxies are available to everyone. This characteristic can introduce various issues, from unreliable service to “leaking” your sensitive data and putting you at risk.

Since anyone can use free proxies, they’re often overloaded, offering low speeds to the point that they’re unusable. More importantly, there’s no way to know who used them and where, so you have no idea if they’re banned on a particular site, online shop, or another service you want to access.

Our premium datacenter and residential proxy servers are a much better option for businesses and individuals. While we offer different types of proxies for all sorts of usage scenarios, they all share certain characteristics. Every IPRoyal proxy offers 99.9% uptime, high speeds, and strict security to ensure your tasks run efficiently and successfully.

Bottom Line

The type of tasks you need to perform will ultimately determine how many proxies per task you need. For operations like web scraping , SEO crawling, and social media automation, more is better. However, sneaker copping, general browsing, and online gaming will work fine with one proxy per task. To avoid issues, make sure you stay away from free proxy servers and use a reliable provider like IPRoyal!