Dedicated datacenter proxies are static IP addresses from a hosting network that are assigned to one customer at a time, so no other customer's traffic leaves through them while you hold them. Vendors also sell them as private proxies or simply as dedicated proxies. The assignment is the whole of the promise. It says nothing about who registered the range, which network announces it, what the neighbouring addresses are doing, or what the address did before it was yours, and those are the things that decide how targets treat it.
The general case for dedicated over shared addresses is in dedicated vs shared proxies. This guide is narrower and more practical: what dedicated means for a datacenter address in particular, the answers that reveal a loose definition of it, a script that checks the registry holder, origin network and routing history of any address, and what the published specs and service levels on our datacenter proxies do and do not commit to.
What dedicated means for a datacenter address
A datacenter address sits inside a block registered to some organisation and announced to the internet by some network. Dedicated assignment governs one layer of that stack: who sends traffic through the single address. The layers around it carry on regardless.
| Property | Fixed by dedicated assignment? | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
| Whose traffic leaves through the address | Yes | The vendor's assignment records |
| The address's share of a target's per-address rate limit | Yes | Only your request rate counts against it |
| Reputation of the surrounding /24 | No | Who holds the neighbouring addresses, and how targets score ranges |
| What the address did before your term | No | Earlier assignments, and the vendor's practice between customers |
| How targets classify the network | No | The registry holder and the announcing network (ASN) |
| Whether the vendor controls the range | No | Registration, routing, and any lease behind them |
Neighbours in the block
Targets and IP-intelligence vendors often score at the level of a /24, the 256 addresses that share the first three octets, and occasionally across the entire prefix a network announces. Your address can be dedicated while the 255 around it are dedicated to other people, some of whom run aggressive jobs against the same targets. A block on the range takes your address with it.
The defence is spread. Ask how many of your addresses will share a /24, then check the allocation you receive. With one address per line in a file, this prints the number of your addresses in each /24, largest first:
cut -d. -f1-3 addresses.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
A large allocation concentrated in one or two /24s shares one fate on any target that blocks by range.
The range's history
Datacenter addresses are reused. When a customer releases one, the vendor assigns it to someone else, and the address keeps whatever reputation the earlier holder earned. Whole ranges change hands too: blocks are sold and leased between organisations, and a prefix announced by a bulk-hosting network last year can be announced by a proxy vendor today. Dedicated assignment resets none of that. The routing history check below shows the second kind of reuse; only the vendor's records show the first.
Answers that reveal a loose definition of dedicated
These questions are specific to datacenter supply. Ask for written answers and file them with the contract, next to the general exclusivity questions in our dedicated vs shared guide.
- How many customers can hold this address at the same time? Ask for a number. "Dedicated" on a plan page sometimes means a small fixed group, which other vendors call semi-dedicated. The number is the fact; the adjective is marketing.
- Who is the registered holder of the range? If it is a hosting company or an address broker rather than the vendor, the vendor is renting space. That can be legitimate, but a third party can reclaim the range, and "dedicated" then means a slot in someone else's block. Ask for the lease term and the notice period.
- Which network announces it, and has that changed? A range announced by a different network every few months is moving between lessees, and each move brings the last lessee's reputation with it.
- Is the exit address the address I was sold? Some services hand out a gateway endpoint and send traffic out through a different address, sometimes a different one per connection. A dedicated static address should appear to the target as itself on every request. The proxy checker prints a curl command that reports the exit address through your own credentials; run it several times and compare.
- How many of my addresses share a /24, and can I ask for a spread at order time? A vendor that cannot say has not looked.
- What happens to an address between customers? Whether it rests before reassignment, and whether it is checked against blocklists first.
How to verify a datacenter range yourself
Registration and routing data are public, so the holder and announcer of any address can be checked without the vendor's help. The script below chains the lookups for one IPv4 address:
- the registered holder of the range, over RDAP, through the rdap.org redirect that forwards each query to the right regional registry;
- the network that announces the address and the announced prefix, from RIPEstat;
- the registered holder of that network, over RDAP again;
- whether the range holder has authorised that network to announce the prefix, from RPKI;
- every network that has announced the prefix, with the first and last date each was seen;
- reverse DNS.
It needs curl, jq and dig. Save it as check-ip.sh and run bash check-ip.sh 198.51.100.23, substituting an address from your allocation.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
IP=${1:?usage: check-ip.sh <address>}
holder='[.entities[]? | select(.roles | index("registrant"))
| .vcardArray[1][]? | select(.[0] == "fn") | .[3]]'
echo "== 1. Registration: who holds the range"
curl -sL "https://rdap.org/ip/$IP" | jq "{
range: \"\(.startAddress) - \(.endAddress)\", name, type, country,
holder: $holder}"
echo "== 2. Routing: which network announces it"
net=$(curl -s "https://stat.ripe.net/data/network-info/data.json?resource=$IP")
jq -c '.data' <<<"$net"
ASN=$(jq -r '.data.asns[0] // empty' <<<"$net")
PREFIX=$(jq -r '.data.prefix // empty' <<<"$net")
[ -n "$ASN" ] || { echo "Not announced: nothing more to check."; exit 0; }
echo "== 3. Origin network AS$ASN: who it is registered to"
curl -sL "https://rdap.org/autnum/$ASN" | jq "{handle, name, holder: $holder}"
echo "== 4. RPKI: has the range holder authorised AS$ASN to announce $PREFIX?"
curl -s "https://stat.ripe.net/data/rpki-validation/data.json?resource=AS$ASN&prefix=$PREFIX" \
| jq -c '{status: .data.status, roas: [.data.validating_roas[]? | {origin, prefix}]}'
echo "== 5. History: every network that has announced $PREFIX"
curl -s "https://stat.ripe.net/data/routing-history/data.json?resource=$PREFIX" \
| jq -c --arg p "$PREFIX" '.data.by_origin[]
| {origin, t: [.prefixes[] | select(.prefix == $p) | .timelines[]]}
| select(.t != [])
| {origin, first: (.t | map(.starttime) | min)[:10],
last: (.t | map(.endtime) | max)[:10]}'
echo "== 6. Reverse DNS"
dig +short -x "$IP"
For an address that nothing announces, it stops after the second step. For a one-line summary of the routing side, the Team Cymru IP-to-ASN service answers over whois: whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 198.51.100.23" returns one line with the origin AS number and name, the BGP prefix, the country, the registry and the date the block was allocated.
How to read the output
A vendor that says its ranges are registered to it and announced from its own network is making a claim about steps 1 to 4, and step 5 shows how long that has been true.
| Step | Consistent with "registered to us, announced from our own network" | Needs an explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Registration | The holder is the vendor or a legal entity it names; the type shows a direct allocation or assignment | A hosting company or broker as holder; a type showing the block was reassigned or sub-allocated from a larger holder, who can take it back |
| 2. Routing | One origin network | No origin, or more than one |
| 3. Origin holder | The same organisation as step 1 | A third party: someone else operates the network the range rides on |
| 4. RPKI | valid |
invalid_asn or invalid_length, which mean the announcement contradicts what the holder authorised; unknown means no authorisation was published, which is common but worth asking about |
| 5. History | One origin, for a long time | Several origins within the past year, or a first-seen date a few weeks before your order |
| 6. Reverse DNS | A name in the vendor's own domain, or none | A name in an unrelated company's domain |
Two details trip people up. RIPE NCC records list maintainer handles ending in -MNT alongside the organisation; the organisation name is the holder. And the latest last date in step 5 is the date of the most recent routing snapshot, so the network announcing the prefix today always shows a recent date.
The lookups prove who holds and who announces the range. They do not prove that your address is exclusive to you, which only the vendor's own assignment records establish, and they say nothing about the address's past inside the vendor's own customer base. The documents that cover the rest, and a sample-trace test, are in how to verify a proxy provider's IP sourcing; why the chain matters to procurement is in what is IP provenance.
Throughput and latency: reading the specs
The figures published on our product pages are 100 Mbps per datacenter address and a median of 9 ms to regional targets, with traffic unmetered at that port speed. We may step in if usage interferes with other customers. ISP addresses also run at 100 Mbps per address, with a median of 41 ms. Three points apply when you compare figures like these across vendors.
- A per-address ceiling is a port speed. It matters for large responses and file transfers. For many small requests, a target's per-address rate limit binds long before the port does.
- A median to regional targets is a distance statement. Half of measured requests are faster, measured to targets near the facility. A target on another continent adds the round trip, so choose the address's country with the target in mind.
- Unmetered means the rate does not move with bytes. The monthly price of the address is the same whether it carries a gigabyte or a terabyte. Many vendors attach fair-use terms, so check whether a vendor's are about abuse or set a volume threshold.
None of this replaces your own measurement. Send a day of real requests through one address and record time to first byte and validated success; benchmarking proxy providers has the method.
Replacement and service credits, as published
For datacenter addresses we publish replacement within 1 hour for any flagged address, 99.99% monthly address availability, a pro-rata service credit plus 20% for any address below target, and a named engineer with a 1-hour first response. ISP addresses carry a 4-hour replacement window and the same credit formula.
Three details from our policies decide what those numbers are worth:
- How credits are paid. Under the terms of service, a credit is claimed by writing to support within 30 days after the end of the calendar month in which the shortfall occurred. It is added to the wallet and has no cash value.
- What service levels exclude. The same terms exclude unavailability caused by your own configuration, by maintenance announced in advance, and by a destination's own conduct, including blocking. So the product page states a 1-hour replacement for a flagged or blocked address, while the terms' service-level section excludes a destination's own blocking from credits: treat the credit as compensation for availability rather than a refund for blocks.
- When replacement fails. If a delivered address does not work and cannot be repaired or replaced within the published replacement time, the refund policy treats that part of the order as failed, and it is refundable.
For static addresses, the replacement window usually matters more than the availability percentage. Proxy SLAs covers what to negotiate with any vendor.
What dedicated does not mean
- Not undetectable. The registry names a hosting holder and the announcing network is a hosting network. Any target that looks the address up can see that, and IP-intelligence databases label hosting ranges as such. Dedicated assignment changes who sends the traffic, not what the address is.
- Not unblockable. A target can block your address, its /24, or every address the network announces. Assignment protects you from other customers' behaviour on your address, not from a target's policy toward datacenter traffic.
- Not a clean history. An address can be dedicated to you today and have been someone else's last month. Under our terms, an address released at the end of an order may be reassigned to another customer, as in any dedicated pool.
- Not permanent. The address is yours for the term. If the order ends without renewal, the address stops working and may go to someone else, which matters for anything a partner has allowlisted. Turn on automatic renewal for those orders, or renew before the term ends.
- Not a consumer origin. If a target needs traffic to look like a household connection, no datacenter address will; that is what ISP proxies are for.
Who should choose dedicated datacenter proxies
Work through these questions in order, with one test address pointed at your real target:
- Does the target accept hosting-network traffic at your request rate? If a well-behaved client on a test address is challenged within its first requests, stop here and test an ISP address instead.
- Is latency the constraint? Datacenter has the lower published median latency; both lines run at 100 Mbps per address.
- Must a third party allowlist the address? A dedicated datacenter address works for that, provided someone owns the renewal date.
- Do your auditors want ranges they can check in a public registry? Ranges registered to the vendor give the shortest provenance chain to show them.
- Do you need many distinct addresses rather than a few fast ones? Then a rotating pool fits better than any static line; residential vs ISP vs datacenter proxies compares them.
A yes to the first question and to any of the second, third or fourth makes datacenter the line to price.
Dedicated datacenter proxies at ProxyForge
Our datacenter addresses are dedicated, never shared, from ranges registered to us and announced from our own ASN, across 60+ countries and 39 facilities. You choose the country at checkout, and /24 diversity is configurable on request. Each address supports HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 and is billed per address per month from a prepaid wallet, from a single address upward, on the same rate card and term discounts as ISP pricing. The datacenter pricing page has the full ladder, and how much ISP proxies cost works three orders through it. A paid seven-day trial is available before you commit to a term.
Run the script on the addresses in your trial. The registration step should name us as the holder, and the origin network in steps 2 and 3 should be ours.