Proxy Hosting: Finding the Best Web Host for Proxy Servers

Web proxies are becoming a hot topic among webmasters lately. They seem like easy money and traffic, but there are a lot of considerations to make before seriously jumping into the proxy hosting market. You should do your research if you are seriously considering joining the ranks of web proxy masters.

First of all, proxy hosting starts with a web server. Most web hosting companies will NOT accept proxies. They are extremely resource intensive and can easily bring shared servers to a halt if they get a decent amount of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy, a VPS or dedicated server is a must. You need at least 256 MB of RAM on your server and 512 or more is recommended. Another thing to consider is control panels, cPanel, the most popular control panel among webmasters is very resource intensive and you can use the 256 MB of RAM on a vps even before your sites are running. DirectAdmin and other lighter control panels are highly recommended to save resources for your users.

Disk space, proxies take up minimal disk space. This shouldn’t be a big concern when choosing a web host. A proxy acts as a transmitter of data, it acts as a kind of intermediary between your users and the websites they want to visit. This requires all websites to use twice the normal bandwidth to view a website. The first half of the data is your server requesting the website your user wants to visit. The second half of the data sends the data from that website to the user. Popular proxies can consume a lot of bandwidth, make sure you have plenty to spare.

This covers the two main aspects of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A decent processor like a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a big plus, but usually this will become an issue after RAM and bandwidth.

What should you look for in a web host when choosing one? The 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 if you plan to succeed. If a host allows you to host proxies in a shared environment, this might sound great and cheap, but you have to wonder what else is running if they will allow you to use a lot of server resources. Only an irresponsible web server would allow one user to consume all the server’s resources, and you may not be the one using all those resources, and therefore you will be very unhappy.

If you go with a dedicated or vps solution as suggested, you probably want good support response times in case something goes wrong. Depending on your skill level with servers, administration can also be a good option so you don’t have to keep your machine patched up and running securely. Uptime guarantees are also a good thing, a server that is not online is not making any money.

Lastly, research what others have to say. If you think you found a good host, check out the company’s reviews, one or two bad reviews are common, but if there’s a trend, be careful. A good place to start is Proxy Host, a directory and proxy web hosting resource.

kevin ohashi