If I used a digital ocean server to host a python bot that scrapes sites that use cloudflare, would cloudflare detect that the ip is coming from digital ocean and block it?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Hi there,
Yes, almost certainly. Cloudflare maintains lists of known datacenter and cloud provider IP ranges, and DigitalOcean’s IP blocks are well known. Scraping through a Droplet will get you blocked quickly, sometimes immediately.
This is not really a DigitalOcean problem, it is just how Cloudflare works. Residential proxies are harder to block because they look like real users. Datacenter IPs do not.
Worth mentioning: scraping sites without permission, especially ones that explicitly block it, can violate their terms of service. Make sure you have a legitimate reason to be doing this and check if the site offers an API instead.
Heya, @11bf7413c9a54f05ae9a392cbae968
Cloudflare knows the IP ranges of all major cloud providers including DO, and blocking datacenter IPs is one of the first things it does when bot protection is enabled. Your requests would likely hit a challenge or get blocked pretty fast.
Residential proxies are what people typically use to get around this, but whether that’s appropriate depends a lot on what you’re scraping and why. A lot of sites block scraping in their ToS so worth checking that first.
What are you actually trying to collect? There might be an official API that saves you the headache entirely.
Regards
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and AI-native businesses
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Start building today
From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.
