A datacenter proxy is an IP address that originates from a commercial hosting provider or colocation facility rather than a residential ISP. These IPs are fast, cheap, and available in large pools — making them the default choice for high-volume scraping of sites without aggressive bot protection.
The key limitation is detectability. Anti-bot systems maintain constantly updated lists of known datacenter IP ranges from all major cloud providers and hosting companies. Requests from these ranges are often rate-limited, CAPTCHAed, or blocked outright on sites that have invested in bot management. Datacenter IPs also tend to have lower IP reputation scores because they are commonly used for automated traffic.
For sites with minimal bot protection — blogs, open APIs, small retailers — datacenter proxies provide excellent price-to-performance ratios. For protected targets, residential or mobile proxies are necessary. AlterLab's Tier 2 uses datacenter-adjacent infrastructure with Chromium-compatible TLS to pass network-layer fingerprint checks, even with non-residential IPs.