Proxy Noobs

This will be my first Summer as a proxy admin but from what everyone tells me my earnings are soon going to be taking a hit. I have already seen a slight decrease over the last month or so and I am not to excited about losing the handsome earnings my proxies have generated for me. I have followed the advice of some of my friends and sold a few of my proxies and made some decent cash on DP.  However I will not be losing all hope. With so many proxy owners calling it quits for the summer it has to make me wonder if there is not a whole new market for proxies during the summer.

Not all of my traffic is from teenagers at school, actually a lot of it is from the middle east. There will still be plenty of tyranical countries, pervs, and people at work who I belive would be happy to send me traffic and revenue. I do think that I will be losing a lot of my US traffic which is what really brings home the baccon in adsense but what if I generate some other companies instead. I will leave some adsense on the homepage but I think I will ad some pop unders and mabey a few other forms of advertising from YesAdverting. They pay $.35 for every 1000 hits from Iran. That is a pretty good rate when you consider you will still be making money from other sources as well. My favorite part is they pay through paypal. I will make an update on my summer earnings a few weeks into it to fill you in on how my plans are working out.

There are plenty of people out there that argue that topsites are not worth your time and do not bring traffic. They say that it hurts your proxy in the long run because it gets them blocked faster. I can agree with that because many filter agencies check topsite to find proxies to block. However I can say without a shadow of a doubt that topsites do bring big traffic but it depends a lot on which ones you submit too. There are hundreds proxy top sites using a warez generic script that get only a few hits a day. They will not increase your traffic and are in no way worth your time or effort. It is not worth the tedious amount of time it takes to submit your proxy to a thousand different topsites. One thing filter agencies look for when searching for proxies is a large number of out going links.
The best thing to do is narrow your choice in topsites down to the ones that do the best for you. If you have integrated Google Analytic as I suggested before you can see what sites are actually sending you traffic and quickly weed out the ones that are not doing you any good. The other positive in using only a small number of topsites is you do not have a hideous pile of links at the bottom of your site. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of finding all the best sites yourself take a look at the list I use below. Just paste the code wherever you like on your proxy script.

<b><a href=”http://proxy-finder.info” title=”Proxy-Finder”>Proxy-Finder</a></b>
<a href=”http://proxytoday.info/”>Proxytoday.info</a>
<a href=”http://proxb.com”>Proxy Sites</a>
<a href=”http://www.thunderprox.com”>Free Proxy</a>
<a href =”http://webbasedproxy.info”>WebBased Proxy</a>
<a href=”http://www.osyt.com”>Proxy list</a>
<a href=”http://www.proxybuzz.com”>proxy</a>
<a href=”http://www.tech-faq.com”>The Tech FAQ</a>
<a href=”http://www.workingproxies.info/”>Workingproxies.info</a>
<a href=”http://proxy-list.co.uk/”>Proxy List UK</a>
<a href=”http://www.sweetproxies.com/”>Sweetproxies.com</a>
<a href=”http://www.proxyliste.com/”>Proxyliste.com</a>
<a href=”http://www.drproxies.com/”>Drproxies.com</a>
<a href=”http://www.mywebproxies.com/”>Web Proxies</a>
<a href=”http://www.freemyspaceproxies.com”>MySpace Proxies</a>
<a href=”http://www.fantasyhide.com” target=”_blank”>FantasyHide.com Proxy Listing</a>
<a href=”http://speedproxies.info/”>Proxy Sites</a>
<a href=’http://www.speedy-proxies.info/’>SpeedyProxies</a>
<a href=”http://easytopsites.com/”>Easytopsites</a>
<a href=”http://www.ok-proxy.com” title=”Free Proxy List”>Free Proxy Directory</a>
<a href=”http://www.todaysproxies.com/” title=”Free Web Proxy List”>Todays Proxies</a>
<a href=”http://www.atproxy.net/”>AtProxy.net</a>
<a href=”http://www.brandnewproxy.net/”>Brandnewproxy.net</a>
<a href=”http://www.proxytor.com/”>Proxytor.com</a>
<a href=”http://www.chavstar.com/” title=”Working proxies”>Working proxies</a>
<a href=”http://webcloaker.info/” title=”title”>Webcloaker.info</a>
<a href=”http://www.juvos.com”>Proxy Sites</a>
<a href=”http://www.centurian.org/”>Centurian.org</a>
<a href=”http://www.webevader.org” title=”title”>WebEvader.org</a>
<a href=”http://www.proxysites.ca”>ProxySites.Ca</a>
<a href=”http://www.azproxies.com/” title=”A-Z Proxies”>A-Z Proxies</a>
<a href=”http://proxy.org/”>Proxy.org</a>
<a href=”http://www.proxysites.in”>Proxy Sites</a>
<a href=”http://mwolk.com/”>Proxy</a>
<a href=”http://www.xgxi.com/”>Proxy Sites</a>
<a href=”http://www.mylinktrain.com”>Link Train</a>
<a href=”http://www.eatproxy.com”>Eat Proxy</a>
<a href=”http://www.proxywhereabouts.com” target=”_blank”>ProxyWhereabouts</a>

Proxies statistics can change in a heartbeat. One day they are pulling 2000 unique views, the next only two or three hundred. The change is caused how your proxy list placed on list and top sites and if you are blocked in most school and work places. You need to know when your proxy is blocked so you can open a new one and continue to get the traffic (and earnings) you are accustomed to. If you have a decent host you probably have something called awstats installed on your web server. Awstats will give you a detailed description of how, when, from where, and whatever else you would like to know about your sites traffic. Awstats is a convenient choice in monitoring traffic if you sites traffic because it does so automatically from the moment you open your site with no extra effort from you. The down side is that awstats seems to exaggerate your stats someone when used with proxies and I’m not entirely sure why. This is why I use Google Analytics instead.

Google analytics is very accurate and if you ever decide to sell your proxy and are asked to supply stats almost any buyer would accept stats from analytics. They give more statistics than you ever thought existed and they deliver them quite well in a variety of ways with all sorts of pretty charts and graphs. They allow you to compare your sites as well so you can see how one of your proxies is doing in comparison to another. The down side is you have to set up a analytics profile for each site you want to keep tabs on and add the code to each site increasing the amount of time it takes for you to pump out each new proxy site.

Something I have recently stumbled upon is whos.amung.us. It’s a little button that tells you how many your people are on your site at the moment, you can click it and find out when your peak hours are and get heat graphs and other interesting statistics about your site. Its easy to ad to your site because there is not a unique code to add for each site. Just add the code below to your site.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://widgets.amung.us/classic.js”></script><script type=”text/javascript”>WAU_classic(’1h3fyu190ndi’)</script>

I would not recommend using whos.amung.us as your sole statistic source but it is interesting to play with.

No matter how you keep tabs on your proxy it is important that you do so. As a proxy web master it is important to know if you proxies are block, if they are being abused by countries like China and Iran, and which top sites you submit to are worth your trouble and which you are wasting your time with.

In the last post I showed you how easy it was to make a proxy site but inferred you already had hosting and a domain name. Just incase you don’t have those I am going to make some recommendations. I buy my domains for proxies at Godaddy because you can get .info’s for only a dollar and your domain name is not all to important. However I do recommend that you buy a domain name that doesn’t have the word “proxy” or “prox” in it or anything similar. Internet filter companies often have sites like these flagged and immediately blocked meaning you will not be getting all the traffic you normally would. Try using works like hide, sneak, browse, and surf instead if you would like to stay search engine optimized but for best results staying unblocked I would buy completely unrelated domains or even school related ones like apchemistry.info.

Once you have your domains you need hosting. I currently have a VPS (virtual private server) from Fiber-Hosting . They are a little pricy but they are a very reputable company and you will not be over sold. If you are looking to jump right into proxies and start a network you should look for a VPS or if you only want to host a 2 or 3 shared hosting is fine. Try taking a look at digital points forum for hosting as members that don’t use all of their server often give good rates. Just make sure they allow proxies!

As for a first post on a proxy webmaster blog I guess a tutorial on making a web proxy would be appropriate. But first I would like to address the question of “why make a web proxy?”

Well the reason 90% of web proxies are made is for financial gain. Running a proxy can be a very profitable venture when advertising companies like Google Adsense are involved and it is a great way to dip your toes into web design. However running a proxy isn’t a simple gold mine where all you do is upload the files and wait for the money. Your sweat (cyber sweat?) will be what crosses your proxy over the divide from an afternoon playing on the computer to eventually becoming a second source of real income.

So back to making a proxy. Your first decision is on what script to use. The four big ones are phproxy, glype, zelune, and cgi proxy. Starting off you probably won’t have a massive budget so you want to get the most of your web hosting. Zelune and cgi proxy are both a little harder on server resources and a little harder set up so if you don’t have a lot technical knowledge or server resources you should stick to the two most popular scripts phproxy and glype. Phproxy is an abandoned project that hasn’t been updated in a long time but in its hay day it was the best. I use phproxy on a lot of my sites still and you won’t be that far behind if that is what you decide to do. However if you would rather stay updated so that your proxy is compatible with the newest sites then you should use glype. Glype also has a full backend admin panel so less working with code than the other scripts require.

Now that you have your script all you have to do is upload the files onto your host. If you are using glype upload the files in the upload folder as well as any of the extra features you would like to use from the extras folder. Once you have uploaded them enter the url of your proxy and you and your users are now able to dodge around any block or firewall you would like. Isn’t setting up a proxy easy?