Datacentre proxies

Datacentre proxies (server proxies) are proxies on addresses belonging to hosting providers and data centres. The cheapest and most common kind.

What's good about them

• Cheap. You usually pay per address per month, not per traffic, and the price is several times lower than residential proxies.
• Fast and stable. A data centre's channel is a data centre's channel: no home Wi-Fi, no speed dropping in the evening.
• Predictable. The address is yours and doesn't change under you.

The main catch

The address's ownership is visible. Hosting ranges are listed in public databases, and protection systems check against them first.

The practical result: on a site without serious protection, you won't notice any difference at all. On a site with protection, you'll get a captcha, and no browser setting will remove it, because the decision is made before your browser has had a chance to say anything about itself.

We learned this the hard way: we spent a week looking for the cause of a looping captcha in fingerprint spoofing, and the actual cause was the reputation of the server address. The full breakdown is in the article on residential proxies.

The second trap: country

A server address's country in the databases and its country in reality almost always match — but not every client is able to determine it. We had a bug in exactly this spot: for one of the protocols, country detection didn't work, and the substitution silently fell back to a default — the US. As a result the language, time zone and currency it inserted were American, while the address was from a different country. That kind of contradiction is more noticeable than the server address itself.

So a proxy is worth checking not by "is it alive?" but by "where does it actually exit from?" — and comparing that to what the browser reports.

When they're enough

• keeping a few of your own accounts on ordinary sites;
• spreading out accounts on sites without strict protection;
• work where speed and price matter more than trust in the address.

A sensible order: start with datacentre proxies and move to residential ones selectively — only where you've hit a captcha.