Buy datacenter proxies for fast tasks

What datacenter proxies are and where they shine

Datacenter proxies use IP addresses owned by datacenters and hosting companies, not by home internet providers or mobile carriers. Your request goes through a server on a high-capacity network, so responses come back fast and connections rarely drop mid-download.

This is the cheapest proxy type at Prokso: $0.80 per GB, compared with $1.59 for residential. That's why people pick datacenter IPs for jobs that need lots of requests and don't need to look like a regular visitor: catalog scraping, price and rank monitoring, site availability checks, pulling open data, testing, automation and bulk technical audits.

The main limitation is that websites can easily tell a server address from a home one. Social networks (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok), ad accounts, heavily protected marketplaces and services with anti-fraud systems often respond with a captcha, a 403 error or account restrictions. For those jobs, use residential or mobile proxies. A simple rule works well: start with datacenter, and move only the sites that block you to residential.

Pay for volume, not for every IP

Most datacenter proxy offers are rentals: you pay for each IPv4 address per month, and it stays assigned to you for that time. Prokso works differently. You get a rotating pool of addresses billed per gigabyte. You don't buy specific IPs; you get access to the pool and pay for the traffic that passes through the proxy in both directions.

Which model costs less depends on the job. If your script needs thousands of different addresses and the pages are light, paying per GB is usually cheaper, because you don't have to rent hundreds of IPs just to spread out requests. If one address constantly moves large files (video, archives), or a site only accepts IPs from a pre-approved allowlist, renting a single address may be the better deal. We don't offer that: the pool is shared, and addresses aren't assigned to one customer.

Idle time is another difference. A rented IP is billed every month even when the project is on hold. Traffic you buy from us never expires: pause your scraper for a month and the balance waits on your plan.

Rotation, sticky ports and threads

For data collection, the main mode is a new IP for every request. Connect to gw.prokso.com on port 823 (HTTP) or 824 (SOCKS5), and each connection goes out from a different address. You don't need to switch proxies in your code; the gateway handles rotation.

When a site needs a session, such as a login, a cart or a multi-page form, you need the same address throughout. That's what ports 10000–20000 are for: each port holds a fixed IP, and you can set the session duration from 1 to 120 minutes (30 by default). Give each thread its own port, and each one works with its own address.

One plan allows up to 1,000 concurrent connections. For a large crawler, set up several plans: each has its own username, password and balance, and traffic moves between plans of the same type in whole gigabytes. It's also a handy way to split projects or clients and track usage separately.

import requests

proxy = "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gw.prokso.com:823"
proxies = {"http": proxy, "https": proxy}

for url in urls:
    r = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies, timeout=30)
    print(url, r.status_code)  # every request uses a new IP

For step-by-step setup, see the guides for Python requests, Scrapy and Playwright.

If your software only supports SOCKS5, use port 824 with the same username and password. The easiest way to get ready-made lines for your tool is the generator in your dashboard: pick the country, the protocol and the line format, such as username:password@host:port or host:port:username:password, and download the list as a .txt file. Instead of a username you can connect by IP: up to 5 addresses per plan, which helps on servers where a script can't pass a password.

Scraping, SEO and price monitoring

Scraping catalogs and open data

Online stores, directories, classifieds and news sites usually serve pages to datacenter addresses without trouble. Rotation spreads thousands of requests across different IPs, so the site never sees a flood from one address. Add pauses between requests to the same domain, send a normal User-Agent, and handle 429 and 403 responses: the first means slow down, the second is a reason to move that site to residential IPs. More tips are on the web scraping proxies page.

SEO checks

Datacenter proxies fit technical SEO work: crawling a site, checking status codes, redirects and meta tags, and confirming a site loads from different countries. For Google rank tracking, residential addresses are the more common choice, since search shows captchas to server IPs sooner. The SEO proxies page explains how to combine the two types.

Price and stock monitoring

Checking thousands of product pages every day is a classic datacenter job: fast, cheap and light on traffic if you download HTML only. If one store blocks you, move just that store to residential proxies and keep the rest on datacenter. Details are on the price monitoring proxies page.

Testing and automation

Automated tests, availability checks from different countries, response time monitoring and bulk technical jobs need speed and lots of requests. Datacenter IPs give you minimal latency, and up to 1,000 concurrent connections per plan let you run checks in parallel. Step-by-step guides cover Puppeteer, Playwright and Selenium.

Data for analytics and AI

Teams that collect public texts, product descriptions and reference data for analytics or AI model training download large volumes from many websites. Datacenter proxies are the best value per gigabyte here. Download only the HTML you need, without images and scripts, and move sites that block server addresses to residential proxies.

How much traffic will scraping use

Since you pay for volume, it's worth estimating usage up front. Traffic counts in both directions: the request, the headers and the full server response. The figures below are approximate; real page weight varies a lot from site to site.

• HTML without images. A product or listing page is usually tens of kilobytes, sometimes a few hundred. Thousands of these pages fit into a small amount of traffic.
• Full page in a browser. If you scrape with Playwright or Puppeteer and load images, fonts and scripts, a single page can weigh several megabytes. Block resources you don't need and usage drops several times over.
• Retries. Errors and repeated requests use traffic too. Leave some headroom, especially early on while you tune your delays.

The easiest way to estimate is to run a few hundred pages, check usage in your dashboard and multiply by the size of your full list. If the site has an API or returns JSON, pull data from there: it's usually lighter than the full page.

To keep a buggy script from burning through your balance, set a traffic limit on the plan per hour, day or week. When the limit is reached, the plan can stop or just send you a warning. Low-traffic alerts arrive by email or Telegram.

Locations and honest limits

You pick the country in the access generator at no extra cost. The number of datacenter addresses differs by country; current figures are on the locations page. City or carrier (ASN) targeting for the datacenter pool is available where such addresses exist, and traffic with precise targeting counts ×2. Turn it on only when results really depend on the city.

The pool settings include an anonymity filter that drops IPs websites have already flagged as proxies or VPNs. With datacenter addresses, this helps when a site reacts specifically to known proxy networks.

What doesn't work:

• UDP isn't supported, so messenger calls and online games won't run through the proxy.
• Mail ports are closed, so you can't send email through the proxy.
• Some websites are closed to all customers: government resources, banks and payment systems. The list is on the blocked sites page.
• Heavily protected sites may block datacenter IPs no matter how you configure them. Only residential or mobile addresses help there.

Before launching a big project, run your connection strings through the Proxy Checker to confirm the username, port and protocol are correct.

Cheap datacenter proxies, rotating or sticky

Datacenter proxies are the cheapest proxy type we sell: $0.80 per GB, billed for traffic rather than per IP. You get a shared pool of datacenter IPs and can run them as rotating datacenter proxies (a new IP for every request) or keep one address for a session. If you only need speed and volume — scraping public pages, price monitoring, rank tracking — buying datacenter proxies per GB is usually cheaper than paying for a fixed list of addresses.