How to Detect Cloud and Hosting IPs
Cloud and hosting IPs are where most bots and proxies live. Learn how to detect AWS, GCP, Azure and hosting-provider IPs by ASN and use the signal in fraud rules.
If you trace where automated traffic originates, you keep landing in the same place: cloud and hosting networks. Detecting hosting IPs is therefore one of the most useful, lowest-effort signals you can add — it's a single ASN lookup away.
Why hosting IPs matter
A genuine customer browses from a home or mobile connection, not from a rack in a datacenter. So traffic from cloud and hosting IPs on user-facing flows is disproportionately bots, scrapers, proxies and VPN exits. That makes "is this a hosting IP?" a high-value question. It underpins datacenter proxy detection and much of VPN detection.
Look up the network and owner of an IP
How to detect them
The mechanism is ASN classification — see what is an ASN:
- Look up the ASN for the IP via ASN data.
- Classify the owner as cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle…), hosting/VPS (OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean…), consumer ISP, mobile or business.
- Flag cloud/hosting as non-residential.
- Reinforce with reputation — known-abusive ranges score higher.
Using the signal well
| Context | Hosting-IP handling |
|---|---|
| Known-good service (your monitoring, partner API) | Allowlist by range |
| Signup / checkout / login | Treat as elevated risk; score and challenge |
| Content browsing | Usually allow; log |
| High-volume requests | Rate-limit hard |
The point is proportionality. A hosting IP isn't proof of abuse — plenty of legitimate automation lives in the cloud — but on end-user flows it's a strong reason to add friction.
Combine, don't isolate
Hosting origin is most powerful alongside other signals: hosting + new account + velocity is a near-certain bot, while hosting + a verified partner key is just an integration. Roll it into an IP fraud score so context decides the outcome.
Bottom line
Detect cloud and hosting IPs with an ASN lookup that classifies the owning network. Treat hosting origin as a strong risk signal on user-facing actions, allowlist legitimate services, and combine it with reputation and behaviour rather than blanket-blocking the cloud.