Full definition
A sticky session keeps your traffic glued to the same IP for a configurable duration — typically 1, 10, 30 minutes or up to several hours. You'd use it when scraping a site that builds session state across multiple page loads (shopping carts, multi-page search, login flows). The opposite is a rotating session, where every request gets a fresh IP.
Most providers expose sticky sessions through a username parameter: `username-session-XYZ123` makes XYZ123 your session ID, and as long as you reuse that string the proxy will give you the same IP. After the timeout — or after the original IP drops offline (residential pools) — you get rotated automatically.
Watch for: a sticky session is a best-effort guarantee, not a hard one. Residential IPs disappear when their owners log off. For workloads that absolutely require an IP to stay reachable for hours (e.g., maintaining a logged-in social account), use ISP/static proxies instead.