A datacenter IP is an address owned by a hosting, cloud or colocation provider rather than by a home broadband or mobile network.
Servers live in datacenters, so most traffic from these addresses is automated: crawlers, API clients, scrapers, bots and self-hosted VPNs. Some of it is human, though. Cloud desktops, corporate gateways and privacy relays also leave the internet from datacenter ranges.
Why does a datacenter IP matter for fraud?
A sign-up or login from a datacenter address is less likely to come from a person at a browser. It is not proof of abuse, so treat it as a reason for more checks rather than an automatic block. Verified search-engine crawlers come from datacenters too, and you usually want to let them in.
How are datacenter IPs detected?
From two sources: published lists of hosting and cloud address ranges, and the network that announces the address (its ASN), whose owner name often identifies a hosting company.
How Hextner uses it
VerifIP sets is_datacenter when the address is in a known datacenter range or its ASN organisation is a hosting provider, and it always agrees with connection_type “Data Center”. cloud_provider names AWS, Google, Cloudflare and Fastly ranges, and is_good_bot marks verified Googlebot and Bingbot. A datacenter address alone scores 10 and is answered allow. DetectBT also checks cloud and datacenter ranges, as one of its signal families. Field details are in the VerifIP reference.
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