Most residential and mobile plans let you choose how often your IP changes.
## Rotating
A new IP for every request (or every new connection).
- Best for crawling many independent pages: search results, product listings, price checks.
- Spreads your traffic so no single IP builds up a request history.
## Sticky sessions
The same IP for a set time — commonly anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes, with some providers offering hours.
- Needed for anything with state: logins, carts, multi-step forms, paginated results that check the session.
- On residential networks a sticky IP can still end early if the peer device goes offline. Build in a retry that starts a fresh session.
## How you pick
Most providers control this through the proxy username or the port — for example a session ID added to the username, or separate ports for rotating and sticky. Syntax differs by provider, so check their docs.
## Tips
- Use one sticky session per logical "user" or account, never shared.
- Keep a session's country (and city, if used) consistent with the account's history.
- Rotating doesn't help if every request has the same cookies and fingerprint — clear state between identities.