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What is a Datacenter IP?

When you connect to the internet through a home or mobile connection, your IP address is assigned by an ISP that serves individual customers. A datacenter IP, on the other hand, comes from a different source entirely: commercial hosting infrastructure operated by cloud platforms and hosting providers.

These datacenter IP addresses are assigned to servers, not end users. This makes them easy for websites and internet services to identify as non-residential. That distinction matters in certain contexts. Streaming services use it to detect and block VPNs and proxy servers, since traffic routed through a data center is a common sign that someone is masking their real location.

Even though there are countless legitimate datacenter IPs functioning at any given time, this kind of IP address is also associated with bot traffic. That’s because automated tools and scrapers tend to operate from hosted infrastructure. On account of this, IP reputation systems flag them differently than residential IPs.