When testing a mobile app or a website, there are situations where you want to send your requests from different IPs. In this situation, you can use platforms providing VPN and rotating residential proxies features.
Many features of websites, mobile apps or streaming services can be based on the user’s IP. You can provide country-specific settings or prevent different users to use the same streaming account. Testing these features requires having tools that can provide specific IPs to the software tester.
Rotating residential proxies and VPNs
A rotating residential proxy is a type of proxy that assigns a new IP address at regular intervals or per request. These proxies use IPs from real residential devices, making them appear as genuine users rather than automated bots.
You can use rotating residential proxies in order to access geo-specific data, mimicking natural user interaction. You can define your proxy as sticky and it will keep the same IP address for a set period, up to 30 minutes. This feature is perfect for tasks requiring consistent IP usage without frequent changes, offering both security and continuity in your online activities. You can use this to test a complete order scenarios on an e-commerce website for instance.
VPNs typically assign a single IP address from a VPN server location, which remains the same unless changed. They have two main usages. They encrypt your entire internet connection and route it through a secure server, hiding your IP address and protecting your data from surveillance. The allow simulating the interaction as coming from a different country than the source computer. They use their own servers with immutable IPs.
Using rotating residential proxy in software testing
Specifying different IPs helps in different phases while testing your application. During the functional testing phase, they allow checking how the software reacts to users coming from different geographical locations. This can trigger specific features, like pricing, currency and tax settings or different landing pages.
During load testing, rotating residential IPs will allow bypassing some of the defenses that can exist at the server or application level against multiple connections from the same IP. They will also simulate more naturally multiple IP interactions. Rotating residential proxies automatically cycle through multiple legitimate IP addresses, thereby reducing the risk of being blocked by anti-bot systems. This ensures uninterrupted testing, allowing you to simulate high-volume traffic scenarios or perform stress testing without the overhead of manual IP management.
Rotating residential addresses could also help you better to uncover performance and other content delivery issues than VPN. They will cover a larger amount of different network types and connection speeds. Thus, they provide a more accurate perspective on how real users will experience interactions with your application than single IP web or mobile performance testing platforms.
Unlike datacenter proxies like VPNs, residential proxies use IP addresses that are associated with real households. By rotating these, software testers can more accurately mimic how diverse users interact with the software, uncovering potential issues related to caching, session handling, or geo-specific content delivery. This level of realism in testing improves the reliability of your results and helps in pinpointing special bugs that might otherwise be overlooked.
Using rotating residential proxies also supports security testing. They enable testers to observe how your application defends against varied network-originating threats. You can see how it handles unexpected traffic bursts from multiple locations, whether naturally or because you are under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This is important when checking the robustness and resilience of the application’s security measures, ensuring it performs well under various real-world conditions.
Conclusion
Overall, rotating residential proxies provide a robust and flexible option to test traffic coming from different locations. They not only help bypass common obstacles like rate limits and IP bans at the server level, but also offer a more authentic user experience simulation as they cover multiple geographies and network environments. This, in turn, leads to more comprehensive testing, better-quality insights, and ultimately, more resilient websites and applications.
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