How to Rotate Proxies in Python with ProxyHub

Rotating your proxy IPs is essential to avoid bans, distribute load, and ensure reliable scraping. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to integrate ProxyHub’s IP rotation endpoints into a Python scraping workflow in just a few lines of code.

📖 Table of Contents

• Why Rotate Proxies?
• Getting Started
• Fetch Your Current Proxy IP
• Force a Proxy Rotation
• Putting It All Together
• Best Practices & Tips

Why Rotate Proxies?

• Avoid IP bans: Sites often block repeated requests from the same IP.
• Distribute traffic: Spread requests across many exit IPs for better throughput.
• Bypass geo-blocks: Rotate through proxies in different regions if supported.

Getting Started

1. Sign up at ProxyHub and grab your API key.
2. Install requests:

   pip install requests

3. Define a simple helper in Python:

   import requests
   
   API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY"
   BASE = f"https://proxy.montgomerynx.com/{API_KEY}"

Fetch Your Current Proxy IP

Before rotating, you may want to know which IP you’re currently using:

def get_current_ip():
    res = requests.get(f"{BASE}/ip")
    res.raise_for_status()
    return res.json()["ip"]

print("Current exit IP:", get_current_ip())

Endpoint: GET /{api_key}/ip
Returns: { "ip": "123.45.67.89" }

Force a Proxy Rotation

To obtain a fresh exit IP on demand:

def rotate_ip():
    res = requests.get(f"{BASE}/force_rotate_ip")
    res.raise_for_status()
    return res.json()["ip"]

new_ip = rotate_ip()
print("Rotated to new IP:", new_ip)

Endpoint: GET /{api_key}/force_rotate_ip
Returns: { "ip": "98.76.54.32" }

Putting It All Together

import requests
from time import sleep

API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY"
BASE = f"https://proxy.montgomerynx.com/{API_KEY}"
TARGET_URL = "https://httpbin.org/ip"

def get_current_ip():
    return requests.get(f"{BASE}/ip").json()["ip"]

def rotate_ip():
    return requests.get(f"{BASE}/force_rotate_ip").json()["ip"]

def fetch_with_retries(url, max_retries=3):
    for attempt in range(1, max_retries + 1):
        resp = requests.get(f"{BASE}/{url}")
        if resp.status_code == 200:
            return resp.text
        print(f"Attempt {attempt} failed (status {resp.status_code}), rotating IP…")
        rotate_ip()
        sleep(1)
    resp.raise_for_status()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Starting IP:", get_current_ip())
    result = fetch_with_retries(TARGET_URL)
    print("Fetched data:", result)
    print("Final IP:", get_current_ip())

Best Practices &s; Tips

• Rotate proactively: Even without failures, rotate every N requests to spread load.
• Cache IP checks: Don’t call /ip before every single request—only when needed.
• Handle rate limits: Watch for 402 Quota exceeded and back off gracefully.
• Use exponential backoff: After a rotation, wait a bit before retrying to avoid bursts.

With just a couple of helper functions and two API calls, you can build a robust, rotation-enabled Python scraper in under 20 lines of code. Happy scraping!