Automated traffic now accounts for roughly half of web activity, and malicious bots alone represent close to one third. For scraping teams, that reality makes the proxy layer a primary risk surface and not just a connectivity choice. A reliable, measurable proxy strategy directly affects success rates, data freshness, and cost per record.

What the network tells us
A typical page triggers about 70 resource requests and transfers over 2 MB of data, so any avoidable round trips compound quickly. Regional datacenter egress often cuts round trip times below 20 ms within many metros, while transoceanic links commonly exceed 150 ms. The distance between your exit IP and the target’s serving edge shows up in time to first byte and in how many concurrent fetches you can complete before throttling hits.

TLS 1.3 removes a full round trip from the handshake, and HTTP/2 multiplexing lets a single connection deliver multiple streams. When your proxy fabric maintains stable connections and reuses them efficiently, the request budget stretches noticeably, especially on asset-heavy targets.

The measurable edge of datacenter IPs
Datacenter addresses deliver consistent throughput, predictable routing, and straightforward session control. They are also economical compared with residential supply, a point made starker by the ongoing rise of IPv4 market prices above 40 dollars per address. For high-volume harvesting, those fundamentals matter more than headline concurrency numbers.

Where do datacenter IPs excel, in measurable terms?

- Lower latency variance: jitter is typically tighter than on consumer last-mile circuits, which steadies scrape timing and reduces false positives in anomaly detectors that watch for erratic pacing.

- Higher connection reuse: cleaner AS paths and fewer middleboxes translate into fewer handshake retries, a small gain that scales with hundreds of thousands of requests.

- Transparent failover: consistent anycast and resilient routes allow faster IP rotation without long warm-ups.

If your target filters by ASN reputation, these strengths do not guarantee passage. But on neutral or mixed targets, success rates often track linearly with proximity and timing discipline, both of which favor datacenter egress.

Risk controls that move the needle
Many blocks are not caused by the proxy choice itself, but by how the client behaves on that IP. Practical controls, backed by observed web baselines, make a visible difference.

Match browser share distributions instead of pinning a single User-Agent. One browser family holds over 60 percent share, which makes a perfectly uniform fingerprint look synthetic.

Honor cache, compression, and HTTP semantics. Returning conditional requests, sending realistic Accept headers, and negotiating HTTP/2 where supported cut bandwidth and raise successful response ratios.

Keep regional routing honest. Exit near the target’s known POPs to align RTT with human geography, avoiding a 150 ms cross-ocean tail that screams automation.
Throttle with human-pace variance. Smooth bursts and apply short cool-offs after 429 responses to reduce block escalation.

Persist cookies and session storage. Stateless scrapers force revalidation and draw attention on login and checkout flows.

When residential still matters
Some targets key on ASN or enforce aggressive ISP fingerprinting. Others tie rate limits to consumer network expectations. In those pockets, residential or mobile IPs can be the only way to achieve stable yield. Treat them as a precision tool for selective segments rather than a default for the entire workload.

Procurement and fleet hygiene
Sourcing matters as much as routing. Prefer providers that disclose subnet provenance, publish clear replacement policies, and support granular geotargeting. Audit allocated ranges against public blocklists before going live. Rotate judiciously rather than constantly; healthy sessions that persist look more like real users and reduce handshake cost over time.

Well-instrumented projects pair datacenter egress for bulk collection with strict client realism, regional routing, and telemetry that catches drift early. If your next bottleneck is proxy capacity, consider whether you need broader geography, cleaner AS paths, or simply tighter pacing. For teams ready to scale capacity with stable latency, it can be practical to buy datacenter proxy access that aligns with the routing and transparency principles above.

Scraping succeeds on the quiet optimizations. Reduce distance, reuse connections, respect protocol hints, and measure what correlates with real success. The gains compound in ways that budgets and block rates can both appreciate.