When a team reports that its proxies have "stopped working", the IPs are often fine. The session mode is wrong for the task: a rotating setup used for a signed-in account, or a sticky one used for a wide price crawl. Every plan asks you to choose between sticky (one IP held for a session) and rotating (a new IP per request). Making that choice per task, rather than once for the whole team, saves a good deal of troubleshooting.
Rotating: a fresh IP for each request
Each request leaves through a different address. On a residential pool the next IP usually belongs to an unrelated household, so no single address carries much of the job.
Use it for:
- Wide price and catalogue checks where every page stands on its own.
- Local rank tracking, with each search query sent from its own IP.
- Spreading a job so that each IP stays inside the site's per-IP rate limits.
- Ad verification across many placements and regions in a single pass.
Avoid it for:
- Signed-in work. A login from one IP followed seconds later by a request from another can set off the site's security checks on the account.
- Multi-step forms, baskets and checkout tests.
- Any flow where the site ties a queue place or a session to your IP.
Sticky: one IP for a set window
The same IP stays with you for a window you choose, commonly 1, 10 or 30 minutes, and then changes. That is long enough to sign in, move through a few pages and submit a form.
Use it for:
- Managing client social accounts, with one IP per account.
- Testing a full purchase journey on your own store: product page → basket → checkout.
- Paging through categories or search results that keep state from page to page.
- Ad checks that need several clicks from the same visitor.
Avoid it for:
- High-volume collection. If the site rate-limits the IP, the whole task waits.
- Jobs that need variety across many requests.
Keep each account on one address
A common cause of account lockouts is mixing the two modes. If a signed-in account's cookies travel through a new IP on every request, the site sees one user jumping between addresses and may lock the account for its own protection. For account work, hold one sticky session, or a static IP from Residential Premium, per account. For public data runs, do the opposite: don't carry cookies from one IP to the next, and start each run clean.
The split most teams settle on
- Sticky per account, so every client account keeps a consistent address.
- Rotating per collection job, so price and rank checks get volume and variety.
Write the rule into your team's setup notes so that new starters configure their tools the same way. For what happens behind the gateway, see our rotating proxies explainer for buyers.
Where to set it in the dashboard
Open your dashboard, select the proxy and switch between rotating and sticky. Both modes come with the same plan at no extra cost. The default sticky window is 10 minutes, and you can set anything from 1 to 30. Exactly which modes are offered depends on the proxy type, and our rotating proxies and static proxies pages explain how each one works across our range.
