Datacenter proxy
Also called: DC proxy, server proxy
A datacenter proxy routes traffic through an IP address owned by a hosting company rather than a consumer internet provider. It is the cheapest and fastest proxy category, and the easiest to identify as non-residential, since the address registration is public.
Datacenter addresses come from the ranges hosting providers hold — the same ranges that serve websites and APIs. They are abundant, so they are cheap, often under $1 per gigabyte or a couple of dollars per static IP. They are also unambiguous: anyone can look up the autonomous system and see it belongs to a hosting company.
Where it is the right choice
For work where nobody scores your network origin, a datacenter proxy is simply the best option — faster, cheaper and more reliable than the alternatives. Price monitoring, public data collection, uptime checking and regional QA all fall into this category. Paying residential rates for them is waste.
Where it fails
Anywhere the origin is evaluated. A device fingerprint built to look like a retail handset, reaching the internet from a hosting range, is a contradiction between the device layer and the network layer. That mismatch is one of the cheapest things in the world to check, which is why datacenter proxies are a poor fit for account operations regardless of how convincing the device is.