Glossary · Proxy types
Datacenter proxy
A proxy whose IP address is hosted in a commercial data center rather than assigned to a home, making it fast and cheap but easy for sites to identify as non-residential.
A datacenter proxy runs on infrastructure owned by a hosting company, the same kind of address a website or cloud server uses. Nothing about it is tied to a home or a phone, which makes it abundant, fast and inexpensive, and also makes it obvious: the address belongs to an autonomous system that anyone can look up as a hosting provider.
For a large share of work that visibility does not matter. If you are hammering an API you own, load-testing your own service, or scraping a site that does not screen by network type, a datacenter address does the job at a fraction of the cost of residential traffic and with far lower latency.
Where it fails is against sites that treat a hosting-range address as a red flag on principle. Those sites do not need to catch you doing anything, the network alone is enough, and no amount of rotation changes what an IP reputation database already says about a datacenter subnet.
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