Top 6 Rotating Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping (2023)

Justin Shin

Do you know that there are datacenter proxies you can use for scraping data from websites online? If you don’t, now you do. In the article below, I will be recommending some of the best datacenter proxies for web scraping.

Table Of Contents

Overview of Best Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping

Best Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping Compared

Provider Success Rate Download Speed Response Time Proxy Pool Size Notable Features Starting Price (100 proxies)
Smartproxy 98.83% 69.63 Mbps 89 ms 100K+ IPs Rotating datacenter proxies $30
Bright Data 97.35% 98.57 Mbps 73 ms 700K+ IPs Support for shared and dedicated IPs Varies
Webshare 87.73% 32.65 Mbps 1.3 secs Shared IPs Affordable pricing $2.99/month
Proxy-cheap 96.63% 98.64 Mbps 96 ms 15+ locations High-quality dedicated IPs Varies
Rayobyte 95.07% 99.32 Mbps 143 ms 300K+ IPs IP diversity, auto-rotation Varies
Netnut 98.50% 77.24 Mbps 121 ms 150K+ IPs Dedicated account manager $100 (100GB)

Whenever I recommend proxies for web scraping, you hardly see datacenter proxies on my list. This is because of their shortcomings — they are easily detected, and most of them are not rotating proxies.

However, it might interest you to know that there are websites you can use these proxies to scrape without getting banned, most especially the sites with less effective anti-spam systems. One advantage of using datacenter proxies for web scraping not talked about is how fast they can be. If you need to scrape a very at high speed and the website does not block access from datacenter IPs, then you can use rotating datacenter proxies to scrape it.

In some cases, you might have to purchase a bunch of cheap datacenter proxies and rotate them by yourself to achieve IP rotation. In this article, my focus is on providing you with recommendations on the best datacenter proxies you can use for web scraping. I have tried a good number of the rotating datacenter proxies in the market. Below are my findings.

1. Smartproxy — Overall Best Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping

Smartproxy is known for its premium residential proxies that never fail. This same provider does offer some of the best datacenter proxies for web scraping. And it might interest you to know that the datacenter proxies it offers are rotating datacenter proxies. This means that if you have a site target that you can use datacenter proxies, then you can save money scraping it using their proxies. With just $30, you get 50GB of bandwidth — there is pay per IP plan too.

The service currently has over 100K IPs from over 400 subnets. In terms of location coverage, you have to choose from the list of a few supported countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. I carried out a performance test to ascertain how effective it can be, and the result was impressive.

I recorded an average download speed of 69.63 Mbps with a response time of 89 ms. The success rate recorded was 98.83%. These IPs aren’t dedicated, though. If you need their dedicated private datacenter proxies, you will have to pay more for that.

2. Bright Data — High-Performance Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping

The only reason I didn’t rank Bright Data first is because its datacenter proxies are not rotating IPs automatically — that is left for you to handle. But aside from that, Bright Data is quite a more advised provider. It might interest you to know that there are over 700K IPs in their pool. It also does support more geo-location than Smartproxy as you can get IPs from 98 countries as opposed to just 4 supported by Smartproxy.

For this service, you also have the option to choose between their shared and dedicated IPs at the time of setting up the proxies. The pricing method is quite flexible, and you can even get a free trial.

The performance of this service s also quite impressive compared to Smartproxy. With Bright Data datacenter proxies, I recorded an average download speed of 98.57 Mbps with a success rate of 97.35%. The response time was also quite faster compared to Smartproxy, as I got a response time of  73 ms.

3. Webshare — Cheapest Proxies for Scraping Websites

Webshare is one of the popular datacenter providers that has been around for a while. This provider is known for its really cheap pricing; you will think it is free. If you need just 10 proxies, you can get them for free from this service. For their starter plan, it costs $2.99 monthly and provides you 100 proxies. You can use these proxies for scraping regular websites with far less effective anti-spam systems.

It is important you know that the IPs are shared, and the performance you will get can’t be compared to what is obtainable from the likes of Smartproxy and Bright Data. I did measure the performance and recorded a success rate of 87.73% with an average speed of 32.65 Mbps.

The response time was usually 1.3 seconds. This performance metric tells you how low-powered Webshare is. However, if you are on a low budget, it is a good fit. Just know that you will have to deal with bad neighborhood effects, as I experienced a good number of blocks.

4. Proxy-cheap — High-Quality Dedicated IPs for Session-Based Web Scraping

On this blog, we suggest more of Proxy-cheap residential proxies because of their undetectability. However, their dedicated datacenter proxies can also be used for that. If you have to scrape sites that require you to maintain a session, then you know you need a proxy that maintains IPs. And I suggest Proxy-cheap datacenter proxies.

It is important you know that for this service, IP rotation is not done for you. You will have to create the logic to rotate IP for you based on your understanding of your target’s anti-spam system. If you can’t do such, then I will suggest you make use of another provider. These IPv4 proxies have been tested by me, and they have proven to be of good quality.

The speed is impressive, I recorded an average download speed of 98.64 Mbps. The success rate was well over 90%, at 96.63%. In terms of location coverage, you can get datacenter IPs from over 15 locations from this provider.

5. Rayobyte — Best for IP Diversity and Auto-Rotation

The Rayobyte service has been in the market for a while as Blazing SEO LLC before rebranding to Rayobyte. This service offers a rotating datacenter proxy network which is one of the best for web scraping. I made this assertion because of many factors. First, the IPs it uses have low spam scores, which means that they wouldn’t get blocked at first notice by websites.

It does have a fairly large proxy pool with over 300K IPs. These IPs are quite diversified as they are from over 9 ASNs, 26 countries, and 20K subnets. And as a subscriber, you are given proxies from multiple subnets to protect you against a subnet ban. You can even use this service to scrape sites like Twitter.

You can also use it on Facebook, but that depends on how well you can hide your footprint. Performance-wise, this provider is top-notch, as I recorded an average speed of 99.32 for its download speed. This, when compared to Smartproxy, makes it faster. The other performance metrics measured include response time (143 ms) and success rate at 95.07%.

6. Netnut — Lightning-Fast Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping

When you need data quickly, you can't just rely on any old datacenter provider. That's where NetNut's premium datacenter proxy network comes in. It's super scalable and performs well for data mining purposes. Their high-speed US proxies rarely go down – they're up and running 99.99% of the time.

In addition, there is a relatively large pool of dedicated datacenter IPs with over 150K of them in the Pool. You can use these proxies for scraping a diverse range of websites. And despite the hesitancy about datacenter proxies in bypassing bots and CAPTCHAs, NetNut datacenter IPs are undetectable even by the notorious Twitter Bots, and it's easy to control them from a simple dashboard. 

While datacenter proxies are typically fast, the speed of NetNut’s datacenter servers will surprise you nonetheless. NetNut's service is built on technology from DiViNetworks, a company that manages lots of servers for internet providers. NetNut's datacenter proxies give you super-fast connections, all thanks to their smart way of switching between IP addresses. They balance things well, so you always get the best IP address for the data sites you’re trying to mine. These proxies can handle several strenuous data activities at the same time without slowing down, and they work better than most other datacenters you’ll come across.

They have a free trial where you can evaluate NetNut's datacenters for a full week without paying a dime. After that, they have different bandwidth-centric packages available for purchase. That way, you can pick the one that works best for your budget and the data requirements of the objectives you’re trying to achieve. The most you’re going to pay is $1/1GB. Larger plans offer better value for money.

FAQs

Q. Are Datacenter Proxies Good for Web Scraping?

Datacenter proxies in their pure forms are not good for web scraping. This is because their IPs have been identified to be spammy, and they don’t rotate IP addresses. Without rotating IPs, websites will quickly detect and block your web scraper. What some do is that they buy a bunch of datacenter proxies and rotate them by themselves.

However, this is in the past. In recent times, rotating datacenter proxies have been introduced, which rotate IPs for you. This, coupled with IPs with low spam scores, make them quite good for scraping sites without an effective anti-spam system.

Q. When Should One Use Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping?

If you have been reading our recommendations for web scraping, you will notice we don’t recommend the use of datacenter proxies for web scraping because of their shortcomings in terms of web scraping. However, there are instances when using them is a good idea. Generally, if you are dealing with a site that does not have an effective anti-spam system, then datacenter proxies can be used for scraping them.

The major social media, e-commerce, finance data, and booking sites do have effective anti-spam systems. If your target site is not big and you know it is not protected by the likes of Cloudflare or its likes, then you can go ahead and scrape it using datacenter proxies.

Q. What is the Best Datacenter Proxy for Scraping?

The best datacenter proxies for web scraping are datacenter proxies that rotate IP addresses for you automatically. These include providers such as Smartproxy, Bright Data, and Rayobyte. These providers route your requests via datacenter IPs with low spam scores, which makes them appear more legitimate.

This, combined with their automatic IP rotation support system, makes them a good fit for scraping data from the Internet. If you are experienced enough, you can purchase dedicated datacenter proxies in bulk and rotate them efficiently, but in most cases, doing so is not worth it.

Conclusion

Looking at the above, you can see that I mentioned only 5 providers. As stated earlier, datacenter proxies are not the best proxies for scraping. And as such, there are not many providers I can recommend for scraping. The providers mentioned are the best out of the datacenter proxy networks I tested before writing this article. So you can see it as a vetted list that will work for you.

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