Punjab University Journal of Mathematics

Web proxies are becoming a hot topic amongst web masters at the time of late. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are several concerns to be made before you decide to seriously jump in to the proxy hosting market. You should do your investigation in the event you are seriously considering joining the ranks of proxy web masters.

To begin with, proxy hosting starts with a web host. Most webhosting companies will NOT accept proxies. They can be extremely resource intensive and can conveniently bring shared servers to a stand still whenever they get any decent quantity of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy a VPS or dedicated server is a requirement. You'll need at least 256MB of ram on your server and 512 or above is highly recommended. Another thing to be cautious of is control panels, cPanel, the best control panel amongst webmasters is quite resource intensive and may utilize all 256mb of ram on a vps before your sites are even running. DirectAdmin and other lighter weight control panels are strongly recommended to save resources for your users.

Disk space, proxies take minimal disk space. This will not be a huge concern in picking a web host. A proxy acts as a relay of data, it plays a middle man of sorts between your users and the web pages they wish to visit. This requires all web sites use double the regular bandwidth of viewing a website. The first half of the information is your server requesting the website your user wishes to visit. The next half of the information is sending that website's data back to the user. Popular proxies can eat a lot of bandwidth, make certain you've got plenty to spare.

This covers the two main facets of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A good processor such as a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a huge plus but generally this will become an issue after ram and bandwidth.

What should you be looking for in a web host when selecting one? Price is not everything. If you want to make money you better be prepared to spend some too. The $5 special on a shared server spells disaster in case you plan on being successful. If a host lets you host proxies in a shared environment this might sound great and cheap but you need to wonder what else is running if they will be going to make it possible for you to make use of a lot of resources of the server. Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all the server resources, and also you may not be the one using all those resources and after that you will be very unhappy.

If you're going with a dedicated or vps solution as suggested you probably want good support response times in the event that something goes wrong. Based on your level of skill with servers, management could also be the best thing to have so you don't have keep your machine securely patched and running yourself. Uptime guarantees also are a good thing to have, a server that is not online is not making money.