Having a friend working as a network administrator at a high school, I can tell you that most of these network admins are overworked with nitty gritty paperwork and simply will not have the time to actively play the cat and mouse game with proxy websites. Only a very few minority will actually subscribe to our proxy newsletters from yahoo and google groups, search in yahoo answers, track the proxy listings for new free web proxies to be blacklisted and added to their school content blocks. Most netwok admins will completely rely on the school paid for content filtering systems such as websense, bluecoat, etc. Yes, there are some cases of them signing up in our proxy mailing lists every now and then. How do I know its them? Some used their work email accounts to sign up, without bothering for any stealth which once again highlighted their lack of time and dedication to fighting against bypass proxies. Some actually joined and then email us, the owners of the proxy newsletters to lecture us on the dangers of enabling school students uncensored internet access and to demand that we stop the proxy newsletter and our proxy business immediately. My proxy partner also told me about reading on a network admin's blog where he share self written scripts to analyze Internet access log files in his school and search for potential proxy sites that bypass school filters. Seriously, I do applaud their efforts and as long as there are internet filters, we will have business for providing web bypass services.
Many people are using free proxy sites to anonymously browse the net without leaving traces at the destination websites as well as at their network filters. They have learned that all the sites they visit during school and office hours are either being logged at the office firewalls or are already being blocked from direct access. Further persistent attempts to visit these blocked websites directly are going to raise a flag and they may risk losing their jobs for such unauthorized web surfing activities. At the same time, they are going to get some serious attention and questioning by the IT department if their work computers keep getting infected with the latest computer virus and spyware. We all know where such malware can be frequently found - definitely not on legitimate sites such as wikipedia and yahoo. Once you get the IT department on your trail, they can dig out your entire internet surfing history, mostly filled with exotic pictures and exciting videos totally unrelated to your work scope. Rather than risk their computers or jobs for viewing some blocked sites while being bored at work, they have learnt to use free anonymous web proxy sites to surf anonymously without exposing their real web destinations to the office internet content filters and to bypass blocked sites. Some people are still worried as to whether using proxy websites for unblocking websites are really legal or not. Basically, there is really nothing illegal about using a proxy server for surfing websites legitimately. It is an acceptable method for protecting your computer from hackers, computer viruses, spyware etc that are common on the web. If what you are doing online without using a proxy website is legal, doing so via a proxy does not change it legally. If you are only trying to unblock and hide your access to facebook during the lunch hour, you do not have to worry about infringing the law. However, infringement of company policies are a different issue. The only thing that matters is whether you are caught or not. As a whole, using anonymous web proxies is legal but proxies are also frequently used by shady people to conduct illegal online activities because proxies can help to hide their tracks and IP identities. It is this context where anonymous proxies can appear to be a gray subject - they are legal but can be easily used for illegal activities, it really depend on what your intent is about. However, if you think that you can abuse the free open proxy for blatant illegal activities, you will most likely be caught up and subjected to criminal proceedings based on what you have done through the proxy server.
It is perfectly legal to manage free proxy websites nowadays, at least in the US. Although you may be contacted by law enforcement to assist their investigations, all you need to do is comply politely with their requests and you will be fine. These officers know the nature and purposes of proxy websites so they know that any questionable internet activities are probably attributable to the vast number of proxy users and not directly due to the proxy webmasters. Just give them your server logs to help them track down the person they are after.
Monetizing School Proxy Users
The rationale of getting catchy and easy to remember domain names will not work to woo new school proxy visitors. You can also forget about trying to do search engine optimization (SEO) when you are trying to get student and office proxy users. Even if you are ranked at the top of the search engine results when these people search for "unblock myspace", they are unable to access your web proxy site because it is already blocked and blacklisted by the their web filter unless you are using a special stealthy proxy script. I am not saying it is useless to rank well in the search engines, but definitely not for gaining "bypass" traffic. Some proxy webmasters also suggest not to use domain names with the word "proxy" in it, such as thebestproxyever dot com. Similarly, avoid mentioning the words "proxy", "unblock", "anonymous", etc in the web pages. These can be easily picked up by web content filters and label your site as 99% a web proxy that should be automatically blocked as well. If you are using google Adsense to monetize your web proxy and you do not have the word proxy in your domain name, you may not get targeted advertisements to show up. For example, if you are the new proxy owner of ProxyAndMoreProxy dot com and you have two 336 by 280 Adsense text advertisement blocks plus two Adsense 468 by 15 link advertisements on your site, this is whats going to happen. You will get targeted ads showing up for the 468 by 15 links. Because your site is a web proxy, targeted ads in this case will be on proxy related stuff. You should see something like "Youtube Proxy", "Free Proxy List", "Web Proxy Servers", "Anonymous Proxy IP", "Phproxy", etc showing up. My experience is that 468 by 15 links get a lot of clicks, several times more than the 336 by 280 text ads. However, each click on average is only about $0.05. It is up to you whether you want them or not. I did because despite their low value per click, they more than made it up in terms of numbers. They typically form 60% of my overall Adsense earnings for proxy websites. Some of you may ask that if we remove these link ads and only show the large rectangular text ads, will results be better? There is the worry that the low value link ads may cannibalize potential earnings that can be made from the expected higher values ads shown in the large 336 by 280 Adsense rect blocks. As you may already know, once a proxy visitor clicks on any Adsense ads, they may leave your site and be brought to the advertiser's sites. The visitors are very unlikely to click backspace and return to your site such that they can click on another ad. Fat hope for it to happen, but when it does, you better be prepared to face fraud click charges. Somebody may be trying to help or harm you by clicking ads on your web proxy. Anyway, back to the question on link ads eating to the profits of text block ads. This may or may not be true. Let me explain this from my experience. There are not many Adwords advertisers that are gunning for proxy related keywords and have their ads shown on the content network, which is on third party publisher sites like mine and yours. They may prefer to have their ads shown only for Google's earch pages. Thus, you may find that there are no ads being shown in the 336 by 280 ad blocks most of the time. You can try this by putting one 468 by 15 link ad and one 336 by 280 rect block on your proxy webpage and track them exclusively with separate Adsense channels. After a few days, login to your Adsense account and look at the number of impressions for these two channels/ad types. You will see that there are many more impressions for the link ad. The more times an ad is shown, the more times it can be clicked on and make money for you, provided all things are equal. So why does the link ad always have ads to be shown? Because those are linked to a google search page. When a proxy site visitor clicks on a keyword link in the 468 by 15 link ad, he or she will be redirected onto a page containing search results for that keyword. At this point, you do not earn anything yet. Only when the visitor clicks a second time on any of those search results will the visitor be redirected to the advertiser's site and you get paid. Sometimes there are $1 plus clicks coming from link ads. Rare but they do show up every now and then. I suspect we get less money per click from link ads because google takes a larger share of the advertisers' dollars here, but what do I know? If you are still not convinced about the viability of using link ads, just go ahead and do some split testing of your own. Set up the Adsense tracking channels properly and then start switching between templates containing both link ads and text blocks versus those having just one large text rect. You can easily write a php script for this task; if you still do not know some simple php, learn or team up with someone who does. I seriously tell you that you are wasting your hard earned traffic by not split testing and fine tuning your monetizing strategies for your proxy websites.
When you choose to avoid using the proxy related keywords in your domain name and in your web content, Adsense does not really know what type of ads to show on your web proxy initially. You may end up with nonprofit public service ads where all clicks earn something for charity and not you. You may get advertisements showing up that is totally non related to proxy. For example, if you are the owner of BypassEverything dot com, you may get surgical and heart operation ads. Yes, theoretically these are going to pay much more compared to youtube proxy ads. However, google may only pay you $0.01 a click for such ads which are rumored to bring in $10 a click. Why you may ask? Because google do not really think your website is everything about bypass operations, so they may decide that clicks are going to be flukes and will not to pay you your fair share unless you really are a health related site. Whether they charge the advertisers a full $10 while paying you $0.01 for a non-related click, nobody except them knows the whole story. Even if you get a $5 click on your first day of running BypassEverything dot com proxy, things are not likely to repeat on the second day and thereafter. In fact, you are likely to find that there are no more ads being shown on your website. Google seems to pay more attention to high value clicks and where such clicks are being generated. Just imagine a Google employee coming over to look at your site when a visitor clicks on a $5 bypass surgery ad. When all he sees are bypass this websense and bypass that filter, he can label your site as a proxy and no more medical related ads for you. You may still get proxy related ads, but if your site and domain name both do not contain proxy keywords, then most of the time you get nothing, no ads at all.
It is not accurate trying to view your site with the same computer where you access your Adsense account with. Somehow google will always show you ads because they know the web proxy owner is viewing the proxy site themselves. Try visiting your proxy url using a proxy belonging to somebody else and you will see what normal visitors to your proxy sites are seeing.
Yes, there is a way to trap a lot of high paying but unrelated clicks by using web proxies and another method. Because proxy websites easily get lots of traffic, some blackhat webmasters use this method to profit fast. By the second day, they will have no use for that proxy website and its domain name. Thus, they need a lot of cheap domain names in order to carry this out but they can get away with very cheap proxy hosting plans. I decided not to say out the name of that method, but most of you should be able to put two and two together.
Free Anonymous Proxy Users
The next type of proxy users are the group of people that do not want the sites they visit to know who they are. For example, I feel horny and wanted to look at some naughty pictures and videos. But I am scared and have heard stories of people getting blackmailed over their records of surfing naughty websites. So I decided to surf using an anonymous internet proxy to hide my real identity and IP address. I do not have any web filters, parental control software etc to worry about. I just need a proxy server, preferably free, that is fast working and does not have problems loading the pages, pictures and videos I wanna look at. The web proxy script it is using must provide complete web anonymity and hide my IP address. It has to be fast and not take several minutes to load a page that is normal done within seconds without a proxy. That means once I find a anonymous web proxy that meets all my requirements, I will bookmark it and can even type in the proxy url directly into my firefox if the domain name is catchy enough. After using for this free anonymous web proxy for some time, I learn where the advertisement banners and links are located at and can automatically avoid looking and clicking on these. I can become very single minded and zoom straight to the proxy url bar, enter the website I wanna visit and off I go. That means the owner of that free anonymous web server will be paying bandwidth for me, a free sponger without gaining revenue in return. Although I faithful come back and visit every night, this faithfulness translates to very poor earnings for the proxy webmaster. The traffic statistics look good, consistently high volume without doing much active proxy promotion and there is no need to insanely create tens of proxies every day as mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. To combat banner blindness and revive the happy ad clicking activities of your loyal visitors, such evergreen anonymous proxy site owners may need to change the web proxy template and design. Move the ad blocks and proxy url bar around, boldly switch their locations, change the color themes etc. After every change, observe if your earnings go up. When the number of ad clicks start going down, it may be time for another shakeup. Note that you may piss off some loyal anonymous web proxy users by doing so. See if your number of website visitors has indeed went down and gauge carefully whether it is worth it. For such long running anonymous web proxies, it is worthwhile trying to rank high in the search engine results for keywords such as “free proxy”, “surf anonymously” and other anonymous related keywords etc. Do not attempt to rank for keywords that are likely used by the students and office workers trying to bypass filters. Your targeted audience wants web anonymity and not bypassing web filters. It will be good to have anonymity related keywords in your domain name, but anonymous is quite a long and easily misspelled word, so it is really your call. You can also use the word proxy in your domain name, no problems as long as you are not trying to go after both types of audiences with a single free proxy website. Not advisable to do so explicitly anyway. By the way, if you are really offering your surf anonymously proxy services for free, do not be afraid to use the word free in your domain name either. Free always work great!
Avoid Abusive Proxy Visitors
The last type of proxy users are your regular friendly spammers and webmasters trying to do something not so clean without exposing themselves as well as other service abusers. These people are trying to break some rules (and maybe some laws as well) without getting caught. They are very experienced users and are not likely to click your ads and make you some pennies. Some webmasters wanted to click their own ads and make some money by cheating the pay per click companies such as Google Adsense and the Adwords advertisers. They try to use your free web proxy to surf your own website and when they click on the ads, the IP address appears to be that of your proxy server and not their own IP. Seems fine, but most of such mischief do get caught some time after. Most proxy owners said that
You tend to get a lot of such abusive proxy visitors by listing your new free proxies at proxy listing sites; that is just the way things are currently. New anonymous web proxies tend to be vulnerable and fall to prey by these abusers - that is why they keep looking out for new proxies online. Imagine yourself as an ordinary student trying to get a bypass school filters proxy from such proxy listing sites to surf outside the school internet censored contents. After being shown a list of twenty proxy servers and lets say all of them have unimaginative domain names like surfme dot com blah blah, nine out of ten times you will click the first few listed proxy url. That is just the way we are – we think the first few bypass proxies should be newer and less loaded. However, you will notice that when your listed free proxy is pushed down to the fourth and lower positions, the traffic hits are still coming. Even when your public proxy is pushed off the first page and appears only on the second page and etc, traffic is still coming! Wow, there are some proxy users that like your proxy url so much that they search for it on the first, second and third page etc until they can find yours and click on it to visit your free web proxy server. Sounds incredible right? But why are your earnings so low despite having lots of traffic coming from the listing sites? If you want real users that tend to click the ads on your proxy webpage and make you some cash, you have to attract the real users by being on the first three listings on such proxy announcement sites. You are only attracting unwanted traffic when your proxy url is off the first three positions.
Start Proxy Business For Beginners
Some people asked if it is still worthwhile getting into the anonymous proxy websits business today? I say it depends on how much you can invest versus how high you wanted to take this proxy business to. When I say invest, I mean your time, skills, relationships and money. The more you have, the easier for you to start in the proxy business, or any other forms of money making ventures online. Even if you have nothing, no programming skills, no web design skills, no money to spare, no contacts etc, it is still easier to start making some money with working proxies compared to other stuff like affiliate marketing or niche blogging. The money for proxies come pretty fast, but is pretty limited to may be $5 for every 1000 real, unique visitors you can get to come to your bypass websense filter proxy. The golden earning period for internet proxy business is over. My mentor told me during 2005, you can easily get 1 to 2 million page views per month for every proxy you created. The pay per click for adsense and pay per view for other advertising companies were also much higher compared to what we have today for proxy websites. Anyway, there is no use mesmerizing about the past because we are neither aware nor equipped to take advantage of those opportunities anyway. If you start in the proxy business today, you will eventually learn a bit of wed design and coding, a bit of search engine optimization, a bit of internet promotion and marketing, a lot on online web monetization, a lot of contacts in the business if you bothered to participate in the community and other intangible benefits.
There is an untold big dream for internet proxy owners who are in for long term profits and running of proxy websites that serious provide a good service for web blocking visitors and websites that bypass school internet proxy. Unlike the opportunistic proxy creators that try to quickly create, promote and sell off web proxies, the long term public anonymous proxy owners wanted every visitor that has come to their proxies to have a pleasant anonymous web surfing experience and to come back again and again. This is the so-called dream of running proxies on auto-pilot forever with minimal involvement. Easy passive profits huh? Just remember to pay the hosting bills every month and bank in the cheques from google adsense every month in return. There is no need to add fresh content to the proxy website unlike those slaving bloggers that are thinking like mad for new topics to write about. Unfortunately, this plan is pretty flawed nowadays. Yes, you only need minimal content pages for web proxies. However, if you want to carry on serving the same visitors, you need to keep up with changes made on the sites frequently accessed by your visitors. That means no small amount of time must be spent on getting feedback from your anonymous web visitors as well as interacting with other web proxy owners in the community, looking for new patches for the proxy script in order to unblock websites with funky javascript interfaces or anti proxy measures. You cannot just let the proxy run by itself without continuing paid proxy promotions such as newsletter blast, banner ads, link exchanges and constantly tracking the returns on those expenditures. If you stop these promotions, other proxy owners will jump in and try to take your market share. Look at what happen with the market share of hotmail and yahoo mail when gmail is introduced with a bang. Proxy users seldom have any loyalty to the anonymous web proxies they are using for free these days. If you must ask, yes I do not believe in that auto-pilot proxy website dream at all.
Compare Cheap Proxy Hosting
If all your internet proxies go down together for a day, you will get zero income for that day as well as lose up to 50% of your recurring visitors. If you rely on a single unreliable hosting company with lousy technical support and your proxy networks comes back only after a week, prepare to start from zero as nearly 90% of your regular proxy visitors would have moved on to other servers. All your money and time invested in web proxy promotion till date will be gone. That also means you should not bother with cheap and untrusted $1.99 hosting services that can be commonly found in a lot of online proxy forums. Sometimes reputable and well trusted proxy hosting companies have bad days and their shared hosting servers take a beating. This usually happens when someone on that shared server is misusing a lot of resources and causing the server to crash. This is not really the fault of these hosting companies; when they accept hosting customers, how are they to tell that a new client is a bad egg that will cause everyone else on the same proxy server trouble? How fast can that server be brought back online depends on the amount of money that proxy hosting provider has invested into its tech support. You cannot really tell by the amount of money they are charging for hosting your school proxy websites. You need to read up on feedbacks by their customers or simply shoot them a support ticket at several timings and see the turn around response time. Do not do it too much or ask irrelevant questions, the proxy technical support personnel are really busy people. You can avoid this down time risk for your proxy network by hosting parts of your proxy websites on different hosts, different servers, preferably in different datacenters across the country as well. You will be really unlucky if all these servers go down at the same time - usually that is the case only for a really serious natural disaster or catastrophe that affects the entire country. If you have your own dedicated server, you have full rights to whatever resources your server has. There are no worries for other proxy hosting misuses and abusers from causing you server downtime. However you do need to protect the server from yourself. It can be tricky to manage the server by yourself. You do need to know a fair bit of how linux and apache works. When you are shopping for a dedicated server, you may come across CPU offers on intel celeron or amd sempron servers. For the same amount of RAM and hard disk, these servers equipped with lower tiered CPU will not be able to handle the intense computations demanded by heavy traffic proxy unblocking websites. Do not even think about running the CGI Proxy script on celeron or sempron servers.
Web Proxy Hosting Considerations For Beginners
Should you buy a dedicated server the first thing you start out in this proxy business or should you go cheap and gradually grow and move things along as you proceed? When you are buying a VPS or dedicated server for running your own free websites proxy servers, you need to note the amount of RAM given on the hosting plans. Some cheap $10 VPS plans give you 128 Mb or less of RAM resources but this is not even sufficient for hosting generic websites, let alone resource hungry high traffic anonymous proxy websites. For example, you need around 60 Mb of RAM just to run the liunx operating system, and if you want a nice looking control panel such as Cpanel to manage your hosting, that will take up another 70 to 100 Mb leaving you zero memory for the proxy server scripts at all. If you cannot afford anything dedicated server plans with at least 1 Gb RAM, stick to shared proxy hosting. You can perhaps start out with a VPS with 512Mb RAM, but it is too dangerously thin on resources. Instead, you should spread your free anonymous web proxies around several cheap shared proxy hosting plans from different proxy hosting companies. Although this does slightly complicate the management of your proxy network - need to login to different Cpanel and FTP accounts, cannot easily keep all data on a single database etc, you will still want to do this because shared proxy hosting are notoriously prone to server outages. Continue at Compare Cheap Proxy Hosting.
Comparison On The Different Open Source Proxy Server Scripts
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.
The Three Types Of Visitors To Free Proxy Websites
Do not forget that regular visitors to free proxy websites can be classified into three types of users. Firstly, there are the college and school students and office workers that are using computers behind internet content filters. They need fresh proxies every day in order to unblock websites such as myspace, youtube, etc. These people need a lot of new proxies because when they start using a particular proxy today, their network administrator may add those proxies into the internet filter software blacklist, rendering those web proxies useless and blocked as well. After using web proxies for some time behind web filters in order to circumvent web blocking, those learned that they need to find new proxies everyday and will not bother to remember or bookmark any proxy websites, no matter how fast or how well they worked. This group of users is more likely to join proxy newsletter and emailing groups on yahoo, msn and google in order to get fresh proxies in their mailbox every day. They are also the same people that are bombarding proxy listing sites that show the latest web proxies available. It is not likely for them to use proxy top sites because these rank proxy in terms of popularity and when they are being created. They already know that established popular proxies are probably blocked by the web filters. To conclude, these visitors are unable to become loyal and regular fans of your proxy. Read on to find out how to make money from school proxy visitors.
The next type of proxy users have been around for a really really long time, before the school students came up with the idea of unblocking internet filters and websense. They have some web surfing habits that they do not want anybody to find out. Have you guessed correctly? Yes, for some reasons, they want to protect their web anonymity and do want others to find out who they are. Maybe they are doing something illegal and do not want to be traced back to their house. Or maybe these people that uses free anonymous proxies do not want the website owners to record their presences.
That’s all I remembered to share on how to make money with proxy new websites for beginners. I will try recall and write more stuff – these should still work and they are free. I am not asking for $37 or $27 or $17 or $7 for the information, but you do have to put up with my ramblings on proxy websites.
How To Run Proxy Websites For Beginners
There are many experienced webmasters, internet entrepreneurs and beginners to making money online etc that are running proxy websites around the world. Most likely, you got interested in the web proxy after browsing some internet forums and saw a lot of proxies related threads. If you are wondering why there are many proxies being sold and bought on the many internet marketing forums around, there are two push-pull factors involved. Firstly, for an experienced proxy webmaster, it is very easy to create a new proxy, get a free web template design, a open source web proxy script and a $10 .com domain or even a $0.99 .info domain when the offers comes around (very frequently if you are interested). All these can be done in a matter of an hour if you are fast enough. Next comes the conventional, tried and tested method of promoting the new proxy. Submit to all the proxy link exchanges you can find. These are either proxy top sites showing how many incoming and outgoing visitors or the proxy listings that rank new, freshly created proxy websites on their index page. This type of promotion is boring, but free. Yes it takes up a lot of time, but it can be automated. Most experienced proxy webmasters must have developed or purchased some auto-submission scripts to help them submit new proxies to the hundreds of top sites and proxy lists out there.
You can also try promoting your proxy at yahoo groups, msn groups and google groups etc. There are many groups with members wanting new proxy url in their mailbox. Some of these groups have thousands of members, and sound very enticing. However, the situation is not that candy laced as you thought. These mailing groups can be classified into open groups, closed groups and moderated groups. In open groups, any member can post new messages and these will be immediately emailed to the entire group. Do you get it? Yes, they are spammed like mad and you can try signing up such groups with an unwanted email account, which will probably be completely filled up within a month. I tested once and I get around 5,000 spam emails in my account. Some spammers use an automated script to blast an email every few seconds containing links to their websites. Some of these emails contain real web proxies, but most are trying me to buy some medicine and pumps to make some parts of my body longer or stronger. Closed groups act like announcement groups where only the group owner or designated moderators are allowed to post messages to the rest of the group. You may think that such groups are protected from spam and the mailing volume is lower. Not true, as yahoo groups and google groups etc have pretty low protection schemes. The email accounts of group owners and moderators are publicly available, so spammers can simply spoof their email addresses for the spam emails they send out. The results are most group members end up frustrated and end up all the emails goes to their spam folder. Finally, there is the moderated proxy mailing groups. Usually, the group owner will send and approve one email per day and this email contains links to his or her proxies. The other spoofed emails sent by spammers are caught by the email filter and the group owner will manually delete them such that they never make their way into the members' mailboxes. The proxy group owner may email members new proxies or simply recycling old ones. That is up to the decision of the owner. If you want to promote a new proxy but you do not own an established moderated mailing group, you will be wasting time trying to compete with the spammers in the open groups. You will be involved in email spoofing if you want to infiltrate the closed groups. Anyway, you will still be facing the spammer competition there. The remaining way to profit from mailing groups is to slowly build up your own. Generally it takes about 3 months to get a new proxy mailing group to about 1000 members. It takes no efforts on the part of an experienced webmaster to promote a new proxy in his or her established proxy mailing group. Scripts are available to extract new proxy urls from a database and email to proxy members every day at a specified time.
Some webmasters even suggest promoting their new and established proxy websites at forums and Yahoo Answers. From the traffic standpoint, such methods are too tedious and time consuming. Such community sites require active human participation in order to reap its benefits. The expected incoming traffic from such avenues is much lower compared to proxy listings and email newsletters above. There is one advantage to proxy promotion at forums and Yahoo Answers. That is the so called search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. Briefly speaking, when you have many links pointing to your proxy from big and well known forums, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, etc, your proxy website can be easily found or even ranked at the top of the search engine results when people type in and search for "proxy". It is a very difficult and probably low yield task to try and rank well for the keyword "proxy" for most proxy webmaster. You have some monster competitions that have hundreds of thousands of existing links pointing back. They are the proxy listing sites, just do a google search and you can see them there. You can try for years and never overtake them. Thus, most proxy webmasters do not bother with SEO tasks which take up a lot of time and effort.
At this point, you will realize the steps of proxy creation and promotions I have talked about are very simple and quickly completed. The best part is they can be easily automated. And they are free as well. The next step of promoting new proxies is simply to buy banner advertisements and featured links at popular proxy listing sites and to pay for email blasts from owners of large proxy mailing lists mentioned above. There are hundreds of proxies listing and top sites out there, all trying to earning advertising revenue from proxy owners. They have varying charges ranging from $250 to $1 a month and claim different levels of potential traffic. So which should you choose? Most beginner proxy owners try to buy the cheaper ones in fear of disappointment and limiting your exposure to risk. Actually, that is definitely the wrong way to select potential listing sites to advertise at.
One good way to calculate whether the proxy advertisement is worth it or not is simply to try out for a month or a week if it is possible. The predicted traffic volume is a very inaccurate gauge of eventual profits for you. Firstly, those traffic may not be consistent, and usually they are over optimistic and over estimated by the proxy listing owners. Next, not all traffic is equally profitable. I will not delve too deeply here, but just take note that 1,000 real US and Canadian website visitors are worth several times more than 10,000 Asian visitors and still worth much much more compared to 1,000,000 fake visitors from anywhere in the world. Yes, there are some unscrupulous proxy listing owners that inflate the visitor count by using automated surf bot programs. You simply cannot tell by the traffic volume, so just ask for a short trial period from the owners.
Some webmasters choose by observing the candidate sites for several weeks ad checking to see if the available advertisement slots are always sold out. Just be careful that some competing advertisers may actually the owner of the listing site in disguise in order to create an illusion that proxy advertising at the site is very popular and worth the money. If you see some slots always being taken by different proxies and never repeating, that usually means their owners are unable to make profitable money by advertising there. Maybe the traffic gained is worthless, or the proxy webmaster in incompetent in monetizing those traffic. Sometimes you have to keep testing and when you finally find
Finally, do not make the mistake of choosing whether to advertise your proxy at site A or site B. If both are profitable, advertise at both! After you have sourced out good proxy listing sites for paid proxy advertising, you have another source of traffic to make money from besides the above mentioned free traffic sources. This testing and sourcing for good paid sites takes time, but once you find them, what is stopping you from creating another proxy and buying more advertisement slots? From this point on, it is just simply replicate, repeat and multiply.
So if the money comes easy, where the heck do these experienced webmasters want to sell their proxies? Firstly, the monthly income from proxies is pretty low. For every 1000 visitors on my proxy website, I get around $5. This can be very variable, depending on your website template and traffic source. In one month, I get only $50 from one proxy. If I needed more money to fund another project, I sell off that proxy. Notice I said "in one month" above and not "every month". Proxy income usually trails off after the first month, despite your efforts in trying to promote it. By creating, promoting and selling the proxy after one month, I can grab the cash worth it is hot and try to sell at say $200 for a proxy. The deal price is usually 3 to 5 times of the monthly earnings. If I try to sell after two months, maybe I can only get $100 because of the ugly decrease in earnings which lowered the buyers confidence.
Why do newcomers want to try out in the proxy business? Well, firstly running a proxy website requires very little capital, around $5 for the first month and a lot of time is more than enough - $0.99 for an .info domain and the remaining $4 for one month of shared proxy hosting. Many students trying to earn a part time income are thus attracted to running proxies. Next, you do not need
Finally, many people are tempted by the so-called passive income promises. Proxy websites are claimed to be setup and forget type of websites. There is no need to keep blogging like mad in order to add fresh content. Proxy website visitors are not here for your content. They just want to use your proxy script to access other websites. When they see an interesting advertisement tagline or banner on your proxy website, they may click on it and you earn a few cents to a dollars (frankly dollars per click are quite rare though). However, there are many reasons why people stop coming back to use your proxy and you have to work hard and get new visitors or get back your old not so loyal visitors. Some will argue that you can use paid advertisement to promote and get visitors to your proxy. Yeah, let spend money and let it earn more for you right? Proxies do get blocked by web filters so if your clients are denied access to your proxy, your paid advertisements are not going to work. This is especially true for the country-level internet censorships. For example, one Iranian found your advertised proxy at listing site A and uses it happily. the next day, their internet Censorship agency catches on to your proxy url and blacklists it. Thereafter, all Iranians that visit listing site A tries to click on your proxy but cannot access it. Bye bye Iranians forever as far as that proxy of yours is concerned.
All in all, I am trying to tell new webmasters not to buy proxy from other people. They are not worth 10% of the asking price anyway. If you think you can jumpstart on the business by buying and not building from scratch, you will be missing the foundations required to become a successful proxy webmaster. You will not know how to create and put together a working proxy from the various components such as proxy script, web template, proxy hosting nuances etc. You will not know how to correctly promote your proxies because I can guarantee the seller will not tell you where to really buy paid advertisements that works nor where to get free traffic either. Maybe some common knowledge such as "oh you must submit to every proxy top site you see, just google search for them..very easy". I almost forgot another reason not to buy - proxy listing sites are only good for the initial traffic burst. When you submit your proxy url to a proxy listing site, it will be recorded into their system and your link will be shown at the top of the listing page. During this time, a lot of visitors to that listing will click on your link and then be redirected to your site. Good and yummy. However, there are other proxy owners coming in with their proxies and soon your proxy url will be pushed all the way down and onto the second, third, etc pages. When that happens, usually you get zero traffic thereafter. You are usually not allowed to resubmit that proxy url to the same proxy top list, in the hop that you will be put on the top of the list again. Fat hope, they recognize that you have already submitted so they reject it this time. When you buy over that proxy that has already been submitted, its previous owner has already reaped the free traffic rewards, leaving you the current owner with nothing. Do not blame the proxy listing owners, they work on the premise of providing new unblocked internet proxies for their visitors and as such, they only want new and fresh proxies that has not yet been seen and detected by web content filters. A resubmitted proxy cannot be that new and fresh right?
Proxy Websites and Internet Filters
Many IT departments in schools and offices invest a lot of money and manpower on firewall software, internet security and web filtering. Many popular websites and proxy websites are being blocked and cannot be accessed from computers in these schools and offices thanks to the internet filter software. These restrictions are usually placed not to protect the internal network from threats like spamware and malware, but to disallow users from surfing unrelated websites and undermine productivity. For example, almost everyone has heard about the company manager that was sacked because it is found that he spent many hours in the office surfing naughty internet sites instead of doing his work.
However, school students and company works can still easily get to blocked sites and bypass web filters for internet though free web proxy sites. Although network administrators try hard to block access to these proxies as well, many new online proxy web sites are created every day around the world. It has become a cat and mouse game - everyday, students search for freshly created internet proxies to surf Myspace, Youtube etc for school bypass while network administrators monitor the web traffic daily to detect and block these free proxy web servers used to gain unauthorized access to restricted and blocked websites.
The most popular destinations for internet proxy users are social websites such as MySpace, Facebook, or Youtube. We are get bored and have a mind block every now and then during school and office hours. That is perfectly understandable. However, these social sites are highly addictive and they can indeed waste time meant for schoolwork and company productivity. The additional costs paying for bandwidth and computer resources in order to surf these social sites can be very high.
If your work place or school has installed web filters such as WebSense or Net Nanny to block access to your favorite websites, an unblocked anonymous proxy server can act as the "middle man". You first visit such free proxy websites to test if they are blocked in the first place. Clear access? Good, the next step is to find a little address field on the site for you to enter the URL of your destination site. Sometimes, the free proxy webmasters make it a little difficult for you to find the address bar. If you can find it after spending more time than necessary, that means many others did not bother to try finding and that proxy website might just be underloaded and transfer web pages faster for you. Most free web proxy servers will bombard you with lots of popups, popunders or interstitial advertisements. You just have to bear with it, since they provide the service to you for free, they must make some pennies from these various forms of online advertising. If you do not like such distracting advertisements, you can pay for exclusive access proxy servers. They cost about $10 a month and can be a lot faster compared to the free public proxies. There are only about one person willing to pay for proxy access out of every 1000 proxy users, so you can imagine the server performance difference when you go the freebie way. Of course, there is the danger of your network administrator blocking that paid proxy right after you have paid up. Normally, these paid web proxies are not easily detected and they offer secure SSL web browsing protection. If you are worried, ask upfront for any money back guarantees before buying in. They are typically used by web surfers trying to protect their online anonymity rather than using it for accessing blocked websites. But you can try since you never know right? $10 a month is quite cheap compared to the time wasted on searching for free new proxy websites and waiting for your web pages to load on these busy public servers.
You may need to try several free public proxy websites before finding one that is unblocked by your office internet filter, work correctly with your intended destination site, fast enough and does not irritate the hell out of you by showing you all sorts of popups. Some even show above twenty one and naughty advertisements which can spell trouble for you if someone else walk pass behind you and saw a pair of curvy round meat on your computer screen. There are now sophisticated content filters being used that can automatically detect and label a website as being malware, naughty and proxy. These use the website's domain name and the html or javascript content on the web pages. For example, if the domain name contains both myspace and proxy, there is 99% chance that it is a proxy and should be blocked. There are no legit and reputable websites that have both terms in their names, and hence there is no risk of accidentally blocking an important website that is used for work or study purposes. If the domain name sounds very innocent and does not contain high alert terms such as "proxy", "unblock", "bypass" etc, the web filtering software can still check for proxy footprints within the html contents. There are very few websites other than proxies that contain buttons saying "Surf!", "Unblock" etc. The automatic blocking can also be based on the IP addresses of the proxy servers. There are some well known and large proxy hosting companies around that supports nearly 90% of all the online proxies you can find on the internet today. The IP addresses of these companies are publicly known and hence they can be added to the blacklist of web filter software. You may wonder what happens to a normal website that happens to be hosted on those IP addresses. The sad news is, small websites are deemed as not so important compared to large established ones. You will not expect the large Yahoo or Wikipedia to share an IP with a proxy, that is not possible so they do not have to worry about it. So what if a small site gets blocked by mistake, whatever little content it has, Wikipedia should have as well if not more. Thats the rationale and argument behind the use of IP blocking. Furthermore, its the webmaster's fault for hosting an ordinary website with a proxy hosting company in the first place. Weird, but its happens very often because some webmasters own both non-proxy and proxy websites.
You need to also be careful about browsing websites that require account logins when using a online proxy server. You are giving away your login details such as your login ID and password and the proxy owner can program the proxy server to record down such details and use them to access your accounts. If you have your other private information such as social security number, credit card details, home address, personal pictures on that website account, you are indirectly giving out these very personal and private information. Do you have any idea what can happen when these falls into the hands of the wrong people?
At the end of the day, you have to think whether all these troubles are really worth it or not. You know you are not allowed to visit a particular site during school and office hours when you find it blocked. Going all out to bypass internet filters in order to regain access is considered a breach of rules. Choosing to surf the web freely without proper authorization can mean getting suspension, loosing complete internet access rights or even loosing the job. Nowadays, mobile broadband is so cheap and wireless network coverage is quite complete and adequate. Just bring along the notebook to work and classes, then access whatever sites you want from your own computer, own wireless network. The monthly subscription costs nowadays are around $10 to 20 depending on which cities you are in and whether there is a price war between the telecommunication companies at the moment. If you already own a notebook or considering to buy a cheap notebook or an even cheaper netbook like the Asus EEE, then just get a mobile broadband plan from the various competing service providers and be done with free proxy websites. You will no longer encounter website filters on the wireless network you paid for.
However, school students and company works can still easily get to blocked sites and bypass web filters for internet though free web proxy sites. Although network administrators try hard to block access to these proxies as well, many new online proxy web sites are created every day around the world. It has become a cat and mouse game - everyday, students search for freshly created internet proxies to surf Myspace, Youtube etc for school bypass while network administrators monitor the web traffic daily to detect and block these free proxy web servers used to gain unauthorized access to restricted and blocked websites.
The most popular destinations for internet proxy users are social websites such as MySpace, Facebook, or Youtube. We are get bored and have a mind block every now and then during school and office hours. That is perfectly understandable. However, these social sites are highly addictive and they can indeed waste time meant for schoolwork and company productivity. The additional costs paying for bandwidth and computer resources in order to surf these social sites can be very high.
If your work place or school has installed web filters such as WebSense or Net Nanny to block access to your favorite websites, an unblocked anonymous proxy server can act as the "middle man". You first visit such free proxy websites to test if they are blocked in the first place. Clear access? Good, the next step is to find a little address field on the site for you to enter the URL of your destination site. Sometimes, the free proxy webmasters make it a little difficult for you to find the address bar. If you can find it after spending more time than necessary, that means many others did not bother to try finding and that proxy website might just be underloaded and transfer web pages faster for you. Most free web proxy servers will bombard you with lots of popups, popunders or interstitial advertisements. You just have to bear with it, since they provide the service to you for free, they must make some pennies from these various forms of online advertising. If you do not like such distracting advertisements, you can pay for exclusive access proxy servers. They cost about $10 a month and can be a lot faster compared to the free public proxies. There are only about one person willing to pay for proxy access out of every 1000 proxy users, so you can imagine the server performance difference when you go the freebie way. Of course, there is the danger of your network administrator blocking that paid proxy right after you have paid up. Normally, these paid web proxies are not easily detected and they offer secure SSL web browsing protection. If you are worried, ask upfront for any money back guarantees before buying in. They are typically used by web surfers trying to protect their online anonymity rather than using it for accessing blocked websites. But you can try since you never know right? $10 a month is quite cheap compared to the time wasted on searching for free new proxy websites and waiting for your web pages to load on these busy public servers.
You may need to try several free public proxy websites before finding one that is unblocked by your office internet filter, work correctly with your intended destination site, fast enough and does not irritate the hell out of you by showing you all sorts of popups. Some even show above twenty one and naughty advertisements which can spell trouble for you if someone else walk pass behind you and saw a pair of curvy round meat on your computer screen. There are now sophisticated content filters being used that can automatically detect and label a website as being malware, naughty and proxy. These use the website's domain name and the html or javascript content on the web pages. For example, if the domain name contains both myspace and proxy, there is 99% chance that it is a proxy and should be blocked. There are no legit and reputable websites that have both terms in their names, and hence there is no risk of accidentally blocking an important website that is used for work or study purposes. If the domain name sounds very innocent and does not contain high alert terms such as "proxy", "unblock", "bypass" etc, the web filtering software can still check for proxy footprints within the html contents. There are very few websites other than proxies that contain buttons saying "Surf!", "Unblock" etc. The automatic blocking can also be based on the IP addresses of the proxy servers. There are some well known and large proxy hosting companies around that supports nearly 90% of all the online proxies you can find on the internet today. The IP addresses of these companies are publicly known and hence they can be added to the blacklist of web filter software. You may wonder what happens to a normal website that happens to be hosted on those IP addresses. The sad news is, small websites are deemed as not so important compared to large established ones. You will not expect the large Yahoo or Wikipedia to share an IP with a proxy, that is not possible so they do not have to worry about it. So what if a small site gets blocked by mistake, whatever little content it has, Wikipedia should have as well if not more. Thats the rationale and argument behind the use of IP blocking. Furthermore, its the webmaster's fault for hosting an ordinary website with a proxy hosting company in the first place. Weird, but its happens very often because some webmasters own both non-proxy and proxy websites.
You need to also be careful about browsing websites that require account logins when using a online proxy server. You are giving away your login details such as your login ID and password and the proxy owner can program the proxy server to record down such details and use them to access your accounts. If you have your other private information such as social security number, credit card details, home address, personal pictures on that website account, you are indirectly giving out these very personal and private information. Do you have any idea what can happen when these falls into the hands of the wrong people?
At the end of the day, you have to think whether all these troubles are really worth it or not. You know you are not allowed to visit a particular site during school and office hours when you find it blocked. Going all out to bypass internet filters in order to regain access is considered a breach of rules. Choosing to surf the web freely without proper authorization can mean getting suspension, loosing complete internet access rights or even loosing the job. Nowadays, mobile broadband is so cheap and wireless network coverage is quite complete and adequate. Just bring along the notebook to work and classes, then access whatever sites you want from your own computer, own wireless network. The monthly subscription costs nowadays are around $10 to 20 depending on which cities you are in and whether there is a price war between the telecommunication companies at the moment. If you already own a notebook or considering to buy a cheap notebook or an even cheaper netbook like the Asus EEE, then just get a mobile broadband plan from the various competing service providers and be done with free proxy websites. You will no longer encounter website filters on the wireless network you paid for.
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