Datacenter proxy is IPs from hyperscaler datacenters — AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean. The cheapest proxy type, available in thousands of IPs instantly.
Price: $1-5/GB at major providers (Bright Data, Smartproxy, IPRoyal). Some sources go below $1/GB for bulk.
Detection problem: anti-bot systems know a "user" from AWS Frankfurt does not surf the internet like a regular human. Detection rate for protected sites: 60-95% blocked.
Good use cases:
- Unprotected sites (gov portals, public procurement, blogs)
- API endpoints without aggressive rate limiting
- Small e-commerce without anti-bot infrastructure
- High-volume low-value scraping (1M+ URLs)
Bad use cases: Cloudflare protected sites, premium e-commerce, social media (LinkedIn, Instagram), banking, sneaker drops. There residential proxy required.
In practice: routing logic in code automatically picks proxy type per target. Cheaper targets → datacenter, more expensive → residential.