author
Christoph Leitner Published: October 30, 2019 · 2 minutes read

General definition of a proxy

Datacenter Proxies (like any other proxies) act as a middle-man between a personal computer and another server or server-network. A proxy server fakes the signature of a personal computer. There are various use cases for using a proxy server. A few examples:

  • The proxy user wants to access geo-targeted content
  • The user wants to stay anonymous
  • The user wants to get around blocking mechanisms

What is a datacenter proxy?

Like any proxy, a datacenter proxy masks the identity of the actual operator. However, it is different to a residential proxy, as it is directly owned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

When looking at the information that are related to the datacenter IP address, it only shows the information of the company that owns the data center. Hence, security systems are able to identify data center IPs as such.

Websites that have proper anti scraping measures imposed are very likely to be able to identify datacenter IPs and will process them in a different way to residential IP addresses.

When to use datacenter proxies

As stated above, datacenter proxies are not really suitable for large scale web scraping projects. However, if you are scraping sites have no or very little anti scraping measures in place, datacenter IPs are an effective way to mask and protect your identity.

Also, datacenter proxies are usually very affordable in compare to residential proxies. There are plenty providers that offer proxy services.

Which proxy types are suitable for web scraping?

Web scraping at larger scale requires a lot maintenance and proxy management, as some websites have stronger security measures imposed than others.

For this reason, we have created our web scraper API, that manages proxies for you, rotates IP addresses when necessary and returns the HTML of the website you are trying to scrape.