Glossary · Proxies
Datacenter proxy
A datacenter proxy is a proxy that exits from a server in a hosting or cloud facility, on an IP address registered to that hosting provider rather than to a consumer ISP; it is the fastest and cheapest kind of proxy to run and the easiest for a website to recognise as infrastructure.
Reviewed 30 Oct 2026
How sites recognise a datacentre address
Hosting address space is public knowledge. Large cloud providers publish their ranges as machine-readable files — Amazon Web Services, for example, publishes its current ranges in JSON so customers can allow or deny that traffic — and some publish geolocation feeds in the RFC 8805 format alongside them.
Even without a published list, the ASN behind an address names the network operator. A lookup that returns a hosting company tells a site the request did not come from a household, whatever the headers say.
Where datacentre proxies work well
- Public APIs and open-data portals that are built to be called by machines.
- Testing your own sites and staging environments from several regions.
- Targets that do not vary their response by network type — check by comparing one page fetched both ways.
What ARC offers instead
ARC does not sell plain datacentre proxies. The nearest equivalent is ARC Basic, a rotating ISP proxy pool: hosted hardware, but addresses registered to consumer ISPs, billed per GB with country and city targeting. Where hosted exits are not enough, the residential pools take over. The trade-offs are laid out in residential vs datacenter proxies.
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
Why do datacenter proxies get blocked more often?
Because the addresses are easy to classify. Hosting ranges are published by the providers themselves and the network owner is visible in routing data, so a site that wants to treat infrastructure traffic differently can do it with a lookup rather than with any analysis of behaviour.
Is a VPS the same as a datacenter proxy?
A virtual server running proxy software is a datacenter proxy with one exit address. Commercial datacenter proxy services do the same thing at scale, spreading traffic over many hosted addresses behind one endpoint.
Does ARC sell datacenter proxies?
No. ARC sells residential, mobile and ISP addresses. The closest product is ARC Basic, a rotating ISP pool on hosted hardware whose addresses are registered to consumer ISPs, and it is ARC's cheapest plan per GB.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]Amazon Web Services: AWS IP address ranges
- [2]IETF: RFC 8805: A Format for Self-Published IP Geolocation Feeds
In practice