Do you know which freely available open source proxy scripts you should be using for your new free proxy websites? If you try searching for an answer via Google, you are not likely to get what you want. All search results are probably listings of proxy websites – not very useful huh? Try looking at proxy forums and you get 50/50 opinions and plugs from advocates of the different proxy camps. Some of these information you dug out online are probably going to be outdated anyway and maybe provided by the sincere but misinformed. What we have compiled are information we have derived from our own experience of running anonymous web proxies throughout 2007-2008, not very long compared to other proxy owners that started out since the birth of the Internet, but there has been a lot of new developments in these two years and we have dipped our fingers in nearly all. We are going to compare the four big open source proxy scripts: CGI, PHP, Glype and Zelune. If you still do not know it by now, there is really no need to pay for a proxy script especially when you are just starting out. These four are nearly sufficient for 90% of all web proxy users. If you are thinking about paying for some neat add on functionalities that are missing from these four free proxies, ask yourself if paying for these 10% visitors are providing sufficient payback for you. Are you really in the business of unblocking websites and bypass filters for others? Is the anonymous surfing experience for others really your top concerns? The following is going to be a boring read, so if you want our recommendations directly, download CGI proxy if you have a dedicated proxy server costing $200 monthly or download Glype if you have a shared proxy hosting plan costing $10 a month. Read on if you really have time to waste and rather not promote your proxy and improve earnings…
The CGI proxy script by James Marshall is the pioneer of all subsequent proxy scripts. The first thing to take note is that it uses a lot of CPU and RAM resources such that you can only use it on your own dedicated server hosting plans. All hosting companies, including those that specialized in proxy hosting refuse to allow the CGI proxy scripts to be used on any shared hosting plans and even on more expensive VPS plans as well. The good things about the CGI Proxy are plenty though. Firstly, it is still actively supported by its author James Marshall and works nearly perfectly with most websites today. Having active support is important because sometimes changes are being made to your favorite Myspace or Orkut which disrupts the proper viewing with proxy scripts. When such a problem arises, the script developer can quickly troubleshoot and release a patch to resolve problems with viewing a particular website through the proxy script. The latest version 2.1 already provides full Javascript and nearly complete Adobe Flash player support. That means you have no problems view websites that uses a lot of Javascript and
The PHProxy script is the most popular among proxy webmasters and nearly 70% of all online web proxies are running this script. Although it has been officially discontinued by its original creator Abdullah Arif since July 2007, the latest version 0.5 has been downloaded 49,628 times from sourceforge. The number one reason for its popularity despite offering less functionalities compared to CGI Proxy, is that it uses much lesser CPU and RAM resources and hence can be hosted on ultra cheap shared hosting plans. A dedicated server with 4Gb RAM costs at least $200 monthly, a shared proxy hosting plan with 100Gb bandwidth costs around $8 monthly and a general shared hosting plan with so-called unlimited bandwidth costs around $3 monthly. Since there are many more beginner proxy webmasters compared to established proxy owners, these newbies tend to go for the lowest investments possible and take out the cheap shared hosting plans and can only use the PHProxy script. Another reason for its widespread usage is due to its simplicity. There is only a few lines of code to be ported in order to use the proxy script with any web templates. As such there are a lot of proxy templates sites around, and they offer a lot of free working templates plus PHProxy script bundles to be downloaded. For a beginner proxy webmaster, you only have to unzip the bundle and FTP upload everything to your hosting account. If you have bought several domain names for your proxy websites, you only have to download different template bundles from the proxy template sites. You only need to add in your Adsense account number in the configuration files; most other coding, design and scripting stuff have already been done for you. The downside to using PHProxy is that it uses a lot much more bandwidth compared to CGI proxy but since they are very hosting friendly (uses less CPU and RAM), a lot of proxy hosting providers sell very cheap shared proxy plans with a lot of bandwidth.
If you are going to start your foray into internet business today with minimal investments in running a proxy, your best bet is to use the glype proxy script since it is arguably the most well supported proxy script nowadays. This is important because frequent changes to some popular websites can cause page loading problems with existing proxy scripts. Having a large support base usually means fixes are being rolled out at a faster rate to please the many types of proxy visitors. Glype is designed to be configured and managed via its simple password protected content management system. It is quite easy to setup and there is usually no need to touch the source codes at all. This makes things slightly easier for individuals that feel the world is spinning the moment they see any programming languages. Unlike the combined methodology of PHProxy where the script and web themes are coupled together in two or three files, the core proxy script engine codes and the web design theme files are clearly separated. Although this makes proxy theme design slightly more difficult for the designers, things become very easy for proxy owners. You just need to upload a new proxy theme to the /theme folder and then activate the new theme from the Glype control panel. Glype is designed to support plugins that can extend its basic functionalities. For example, there are many new plugins designed to improve handling of websites such as playing video on youtube, sending chat messages on web messengers etc. Some of these plugins cost a licence fee, so do take note. The latest version of Glype has support for javascript and works with nearly all the functionalities for both Myspace and Facebook directly out of the box, so you do not need to pay for any new plugins if proxifying Myspace and Facebook is important for your anonymous proxy users. Most proxy webmasters have tested Glype and observed that it is considerably faster then PHPproxy. A fast unblocking proxy is likely to get more recurring anonymous proxy users. Glype can also do server-side caching to improve page loading speed and CPU/RAM resources for commonly requested web pages. By loading these pages from the locally stored copies, tour bandwidth bills will also be reduced, although you may need to have a fairly large disk space for benefits of Glype caching to show.
The Zelune proxy script is more or less discontinued. It is seldom used although it claims to use lesser bandwidth and RAM compared to PHProxy, the CPU usage is observed to be higher. Some proxy webmasters claimed because the Zelune proxy script is less well known and of a lower profile, they are less likely to be targeted by web filtering companies. Thus, they are able to remain unblocked and continued to be used by college students and office workers that need to actively bypass website filters and web blocking firewalls. Actually, Zelune will be reborn as the new PHPhantom proxy script. This new proxy server is still in the development works and not freely available for downloads. Some proxy webmasters have been selected to join in for beta testing – I remembered someone saying the current version is a bit slow in loading pages compared to Glype. However, this newcomer has a very distinct feature that excited a lot of proxy owners – the problem of getting new proxies unblocked and unfiltered. The creators are touting that PHPhantom main strength will be its stealth and cloaking functions to trick web filtering spiders and internet protection bots into thinking that any anonymous web proxies running the PHPhantom script is not a proxy website that should be filtered. This is probably done as in other web content cloaking techniques used by blackhat webmasters - showing parental control spiders and web blocking bots one modified version of the website while showing human users the real version. They are tracking the IPs of the servers used by web content filtering companies such as websense and either blocking their spiders from accessing or showing them something like wikipedia content pages. When the websense internet filter spider bot sees "calculus", "differential equations", and other innocent terms and topics, it will say "ok, the school students will need information from this website, so lets give them open access". If your free proxy websites are not blocked frequently, chances are you will get good recurring proxy traffic since students no longer need to look for proxy new servers to get school filters bypass.