A datacenter proxy is a proxy whose exit IP belongs to a hosting company or a cloud. Every site you reach through it sees the address of a server, and the registry that records that address names the company holding it. That one fact explains the rest. Datacenter IPs are plentiful and cheap, and a site that wants home visitors can tell them apart.
Datacenter proxy
proxy type
A proxy whose exit IP belongs to a hosting company or a cloud. Websites see a server's address, and the registry that records it names the company that holds it.
How does a datacenter proxy work?
Your client connects to the proxy, and the proxy opens the connection to the site from its own address. The site sees the proxy's IP in place of yours. The exception is a transparent proxy, which forwards your address in a header. The proxy runs on a server in a data center, so its address comes from the block of the company that runs that server.
Who holds a datacenter IP?
A registry keeps the record. IANA hands out address blocks to five regional registries. ARIN covers North America and RIPE NCC covers Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. APNIC covers Asia and the Pacific, LACNIC Latin America and AFRINIC Africa. They record who holds each block and answer over RDAP, a protocol that returns the record as JSON (RFC 9082). Each holder also runs networks with their own AS number, and our explainer on ASNs covers how that number is looked up.
We asked the registry about seven addresses on October 23, 2026. Six are the first address of a block in a cloud's own list. The seventh is Comcast's public resolver, for contrast.
Six addresses came back held by a cloud, each inside that cloud's own list. The seventh came back held by Comcast, a home internet provider, and sits in none of the lists. That is the whole difference between a datacenter exit and a residential one, as the record shows it.
How can a website tell a datacenter proxy?
From the network the address belongs to, which the site can read on every request. Cloudflare, for example, gives the sites behind it a field for their rules called ip.src.asnum. Its documentation describes the field as "the Autonomous System (AS) number associated with the client IP address".
The large clouds make it easier still, because they publish lists of their own addresses. AWS says its list exists so that "you can identify traffic from AWS". Google, Microsoft and Oracle publish theirs, and DigitalOcean and Linode publish location files that cover their blocks. We downloaded six of these lists on October 23, 2026, and counted the unique IPv4 addresses in each.
The lists have limits. AWS writes that it does not publish the ranges of all its services, and it leaves out the blocks customers bring to AWS themselves. Most hosting companies publish no list at all. Their addresses still carry their names in the registry, so the record catches what the lists miss.
You can read the same record. Our online proxy checker shows the internet provider and network number behind each exit in its Network column. It adds a flag when the network belongs to a hosting company. Our proxy checker app runs the same check from your own connection.
To read the record by hand, ask ARIN's RDAP server, which passes each query to the right registry:
curl -s https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/34.1.208.1
The JSON names the network, and the entity with the role "registrant" names the holder, here Google LLC. If an exit you bought comes back held by a cloud or a hosting company, it is a datacenter exit, whatever the plan calls it.
What does a datacenter proxy cost?
Datacenter IPs are sold in a different way from residential traffic. We recorded the datacenter prices of 58 sellers between August and mid-October 2026. Of those, 38 priced by the IP, 20 by the gigabyte and 13 by monthly plan, and some used more than one.
At the 19 sellers whose smallest purchase is a single IP, one IPv4 address for a month cost a median $1.77. The range ran from $1.00 to $4.90. For five of the 19, our record notes unlimited or unmetered traffic. A residential gigabyte, for comparison, cost a median $2.90 at 57 sellers in our price study of a 10 GB purchase. On a plan with unlimited traffic, a job that moves 50 GB a month pays the same as a job that moves one.
Our guide to what proxies cost sets every type side by side. Unlimited bandwidth is sold on datacenter, ISP and mobile plans, while residential is sold by the gigabyte. Our page on unlimited residential proxies explains why.
What is the difference between shared and dedicated?
A shared datacenter IP serves several customers at once. One large seller caps its shared IPs at three users each, and another says its private tier is "Shared with 1-2 users". A shared IP carries whatever its other users did with it, which a site may already hold against the address.
A dedicated IP is yours alone for the period you pay, so its history from then on is your own. If the job depends on how the address looks to the site, pay for dedicated.
What about IPv6 datacenter proxies?
They cost less per address and reach fewer sites. In our records, one IPv6 address for a month cost $0.25 to $1.05 at four sellers that sell a single address. Other sellers sell IPv6 only in blocks of 10 or 100 addresses.
An IPv6 exit can only reach a site that accepts IPv6 connections. W3Techs, which surveys websites daily, counted IPv6 on 32.2 percent of all websites in October 2026. So test that your target answers over IPv6 before you buy IPv6 for it.
When is a datacenter proxy the right tool?
When your target accepts it, and only a test on that target can tell you. Pick two or three datacenter IPs and the page you plan to use. Send a few dozen real requests, the way your tool will send them. Count how many return the page you wanted.
Most requests succeed
Keep datacenter
the cheaper tool for this job
Choose dedicated IPs
when the address's history matters
Test again later
a site can change its rules
Many are challenged or refused
Try ISP proxies
an internet provider's address on a server
Try residential
home addresses, billed by the gigabyte
Repeat the same test
same page, same tool, same count
Jobs on your own sites, such as uptime checks and load tests, have no reason to need a home address. A target that refuses hosting networks needs a residential exit, and datacenter vs residential proxies compares the two in full. The in-between is the ISP proxy: an address registered to an internet provider, served from a machine in a data center. For scraping, our guide to proxies for web scraping covers which type fits which kind of site.
Where do our datacenter proxies stand?
Our datacenter proxies cost $1.58 per IP a month for IPv4 and $0.10 per IP for IPv6. The catalog lists them dedicated or shared, with unlimited bandwidth. When a target refuses them, residential costs $0.50/GB for one GB, falling to $0.44/GB at 2,000 GB+. ISP proxies sit between the two. Our free proxy list shows what public datacenter proxies look like before you spend anything.
