Datacenter Proxy

A datacenter proxy is an IP address allocated to a server in a commercial cloud or hosting provider. Because thousands of datacenter IPs share known address ranges (AWS, Google Cloud, OVH, Hetzner), they are easy for anti-bot systems to identify and block. Despite this, datacenter proxies remain useful: they are dramatically cheaper than residential proxies, faster, and entirely sufficient for scraping sites that do not actively filter cloud traffic.

Cost is the main appeal. Datacenter proxies typically price per IP per month or per request, with rates often 10–100x lower than residential equivalents. For internal corporate sites, public APIs without strict rate limits, or smaller-scale scraping projects, datacenter IPs are usually the right starting point. Many providers sell tiered access where you can rotate through a pool of thousands of datacenter IPs to spread requests and reduce per-IP rate limit pressure.

For AI builders, the practical decision rule is: try datacenter first, escalate to residential only when blocks force you to. Some scraping APIs (ZenRows, ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee) automatically tier the request – datacenter by default, residential on retry – which keeps cost down while preserving success rates on hostile targets.