Rotation of IPs in Proxy Servers

This Help article addresses questions about proxy server IP rotation, blocked requests, and related error response messages.

You cannot change the rotation speed of a server. Except for the open and world proxies, all proxy servers rotate IPs on a 12-hour cycle. When you launch a request, an IP is chosen at random, which you can check on a site such as Sometimes you may need to refresh the page to display a different IP.

Blocks Due to Slow IP Rotation

If your requests are getting blocked and you believe IP rotation is a factor, that means the IP may be sending too many requests at a time to the remote site. Best practice is to distribute your requests across more proxies. On the higher level ProxyMesh plans, you can access and send requests to 5 proxies or more at a time. You won't need to do any manual switching. The rotation times are staggered, so they don't rotate all at once.

With access to 5 or more proxies at a time, you can minimize blocks resulting from duplicate requests to one proxy in the same rotation period. For example, you could list the proxy servers you have access to and then, for each request, randomly choose one of the proxies.

You can currently access up to 15 rotating proxies total. Each one has 10 IPs at a time, rotating twice per day, so every proxy gets 20 IPs per day. With 15 proxies, that's 300 IPs total per day. If you want to add extra proxies to your plan, please contact support to let us know how many extra proxies to add.

Note: Adding the world proxy as an extra is equivalent to adding 5 extra rotating proxies.

Error Responses

If you are making a request that does not display as expected, you may receive error response 403 or 408.

Error 403 means that you are trying to use a proxy to which access is not allowed, or that's not authorized in your account. In one common example, this can happen with a request via ProxyMesh for access to a Google site or a search engine. ProxyMesh doesn't work well for that type of request, and we recommend or Luminati instead.

In other cases, you can often resolve a 403 response through IP authentication. For proper authentication, your best bet is to add IPs to your ProxyMesh dashboard. This link will take you to the appropriate section for adding an IP.

Error 408, the timeout response, means a request sent to a server took longer than the server was configured to wait. The ProxyMesh proxy server has a default response timeout of 20 seconds. If a remote server does not respond in that time, the 408 response code appears and the target server will close down the request. If you need to wait longer for a complete response, use the X-ProxyMesh-Timeout header to specify the number of seconds you want to wait.

If you suspect that specific IPs are triggering the 408 error response, you can review the X-ProxyMesh-IP response header to see which IPs are being used for a request, and perhaps filter them out.

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