A datacenter proxy routes your requests through an IP address owned by a hosting or cloud provider — AWS, OVH, Hetzner — rather than a consumer internet connection. It's the fastest and cheapest proxy type, and the easiest for a site to flag, because real people rarely browse from those IP ranges.
Every IP address belongs to an ASN — the network that owns it — and sites can look that ownership up in milliseconds. A datacenter proxy's ASN resolves to a hosting company, which is a strong signal on its own: almost no ordinary visitor's home internet traffic originates from a cloud provider's IP block, so anti-bot systems treat the whole range with elevated suspicion by default, sometimes blocking it outright regardless of behavior.
That ASN-level suspicion is the entire tradeoff. Datacenter IPs are abundant, cheap (often a flat monthly rate rather than metered bandwidth), and fast, because the servers behind them are built for throughput — but the IP type itself works against you on any site that checks it.
Plenty of scraping targets don't fingerprint IP ownership at all — internal tools, government data portals, and many sites without a serious anti-bot posture serve datacenter traffic identically to residential traffic. For those, datacenter proxies are strictly the better choice: same result, a fraction of the cost.
The line shows up on sites with real anti-bot systems — e-commerce, ticketing, social platforms, anything behind a strict Cloudflare or Akamai configuration — where datacenter ASN ranges are checked as a matter of course and often blocked before any other signal is even evaluated. Paying for residential IPs against a target that doesn't check ASN wastes budget; using datacenter IPs against one that does gets you blocked immediately.
import requests
proxies = {"http": "http://user:pass@datacenter-proxy.example.com:8000"}
response = requests.get("https://example.com/products", proxies=proxies, timeout=15)How Crawlora handles this
Crawlora routes each request through datacenter or residential pools based on what the target actually requires, so you're not manually deciding — or overpaying for residential IPs on targets that never check ASN in the first place.
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Glossary
FAQ
Both route traffic through a third-party IP, but a VPN is built for one user's privacy on one connection at a time. A datacenter proxy pool is built for automated traffic at scale — many concurrent requests, often with rotation across thousands of IPs.
Sites can look up an IP's owning ASN instantly, and datacenter ASNs belong to hosting providers that ordinary consumer traffic almost never comes from. Anti-bot systems use that ASN mismatch as a standalone signal, independent of how the request otherwise behaves.
Start with datacenter — it's cheaper and works on the majority of sites without strict anti-bot protection. Move to residential only for the specific targets that actively block datacenter ASN ranges; paying residential rates everywhere is usually wasted spend.
Beyond Datacenter Proxy, Crawlora's own docs cover the rest of the stack — browse the APIs, test a request in Playground, and move from scraping infrastructure work to production data workflows.