All devices connected to a network will have an IP (Internet Protocol) address. In the simplest of terms, an IP address is like a phone number for each device. It’s unique to that device and is used for communication between devices. Internet service providers can identify users by their IP and this address is also used to move information online.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of IP addresses available today:
- IPv4
- IPv6
We’ll explain the differences between the two in this guide - with a specific focus on web-scraping and proxies. Web scraping is when you automatically copy information from a website. You may use this for multiple purposes, such as gathering third-party cookie data from a website. Proxies are how you can mask or cover your IP address by subbing it with another one. It keeps your browsing habits private and can be highly useful when web scraping as a proxy can avoid blocks or access restricted content.
With that in mind, which of these IP addresses is the best for web-scraping and proxies?
What are IPv4 Proxies?
IPv4 addresses are what many consider “traditional” IP addresses. The format is a 32-bit address across 4 bytes and looks like this: 185.107.80.231 or 193.0.3.189. The numbers within each “byte” (or section between decimal points) can be any value between 0 and 255.
An IPv4 IP address is the older option of the two. This makes it far more common and there are a limited number of IPv4 addresses out there - around 4.3 billion, in fact. While these limitations may seem bad, they actually make IPv4 addresses better for web-scraping and proxies.
Why? Because they have a much broader interoperability across all websites. This means you can obtain a premium Static Residential ISP proxies or a Rotating Residential Proxies with full confidence that it will apply to the majority of websites you’re working with. After all, over 90% of internet traffic still goes through IPv4.
Moreover, this IP supports far more residential addresses than the alternative and has better support for all websites in general. Despite being the older of the two - and arguably more expensive - the vast implementation of IPv4 across the world makes it the number one choice for web-scraping and proxies.
There are some potential downsides of IPv4 to note - but we’ll talk about them as we explain IPv6.
What are IPv6 Proxies?
An IPv6 address has a vastly different format to an IPv4. The latter is a 32-bit address while the former is 128 bits. These addresses are technically classified as a set of “16-bit hexadecimal separated by colons”. You have 8 groups - each group is a 16-bit group - and each group has 4 hexadecimal numbers in it.
For reference, “hexadecimal” numbers are represented by 16 symbols: 0-9 and then A, B, C, D, E & F.
Therefore, an IPv6 address can look like this: 2001:0DC8:E004:0001:0000:0002:0034:F00A. It’s easy to distinguish an IPv6 from an IPv4 as the former is a lot longer and one contains letters while the other only has numbers. An even quicker way to spot the difference is that IPv4 uses decimal points while IPv6 uses colons.
As you can probably guess, IPv6 is a newer Internet Protocol version. It’s been updated and has far more IP addresses than IPv4. The difference is staggering - you’re getting over 340 undecillion web addresses from this Internet Protocol. To put this into context, 1,000 trillion billions are in one undecillion!
That shows you just how many more IPv6 addresses there are in the world - but is this good for web scraping and proxies? As we noted earlier, IPv4 is the better of the two options and this is largely because not all websites support IPv6. It’s currently reported that only 25.4% of all websites support this Internet Protocol. In other words, nearly three-quarters of all websites are NOT supported by IPv6.
This means there will be significant compatibility issues most of the time. It’s why the majority of experts recommend IPv4 for web scraping and proxies because more websites are compatible. It’s something of a risk when you use IPv6 as you don’t know for sure if the site will be able to utilize it.
There are some upsides of IPv6 worth knowing as well.
Compared to IPv4, these IP addresses are a lot cheaper and less likely to be blocked because there are more than them. The biggest issue with IPv4 is that they’re so common it’s much easier for websites to detect them and block your web-scraping activities. So, if you 100% know that a website is compatible with IPv6 - and you wish to scrape it - then it could be a better option as it’ll be much more affordable.
Conclusion
Many people get confused because IPv6 looks like it should be the better option. It’s cheaper, less likely to get blocked, and there are more addresses available. However, the big problem is compatibility. 90% of web traffic goes through IPv4 while only 25% of websites use IPv6. It’s simply not practical to use IPv6 unless you know the specific website you’re scraping is compatible with it.
That’s why IPv4 is generally the better proxy for web-scraping as it can be used a lot further around the internet. You’re less likely to run into compatibility issues and can scrape the majority of websites without faults.
