Make Your Own Web Proxy Site

Proxies are of many types and for different uses.

Here, we are talking about web based proxies which are commonly used to bypass surfing restrictions at school, office, library, etc. These are also used to access region-restricted content. For example, someone in Canada trying to see Hulu content won't be able to, because Hulu restricts videos to U.S. users only. But if they connect to a U.S. based proxy first, they can bypass that restriction. 

Web based proxy sites are easy to set up and once setup, require almost no maintenance or update.

Requirements:

• Web Host
• Proxy Script

Web Host: 

You need web server with PHP. Now a days, most web hosts support it.

Proxy sites have very high bandwidth usage. So it is better to get a paid hosting. Yet, most hosting services may cancel your account when your proxy starts using high bandwidth i.e. gets high number of visitors. However, few are specialized for proxies such as:

http://www.santrex.net
http://www.monsterprox.com
http://www.xproxyhost.com

But as a starter, you may try free web hosts such as 3owl. I also have several Proxy sites with them which are functioning satisfactorily.

Get some experience with proxy setup and promotion. Later you may switch to paid hosting.

Another aspect is the domain name. All free and paid hosts allow you to choose a free sub domain. You may use the sub domain. In this case your proxy address would be http://chosen-subdomain.webhost.com

On the other hand, you may register your own domain name and use it. Domain names are registered for around $10.

Proxy Script: 

The most used proxy scripts are Glype and PHProxy.

PHProxy is easier to setup. We will illustrate using it. However, Glype setup is also quite simple.

Since the original coder of PHProxy stopped developing it further several years ago, others have been developing it. So there are a variety of versions available.

You may get any version. Here is the link to one of these:
Caprio's PHProxy at Google Code

Next, you need to install the PHProxy on your web server.

Installation:

It can't be more simpler. Just login to your web host. Go to Control Panel. Open file manager and upload the .PHP, .CSS, .JS, .inc (if present) files to your root folder. Ignore the .txt files in the downloaded .zip file.

The uploading can also be done through FTP, login details for which will be available to you on the web host's website after login. 

Run Your Proxy:

Now just access your account URL. For example if you registered subdomain xyz with 3owl.com, your proxy URL would be http://xyz.3owl.com. URL form will come up. Enter the URL of a blocked website and click the button. You and any visitor to your site can now access all blocked websites.

Next steps would be to promote your proxy site and get advertisements for it to make some money. These will be covered in a coming blog.

Till then, experiment with setting up proxy site(s)!!!