What hosting for Proxies ?

Proxies became a really hot topic amongst webmasters lately. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are many considerations to be made before you seriously jump into the proxy hosting market. You should do your research if you are seriously considering joining the ranks of proxy web masters.

To begin, proxy hosting starts with a web host. All webhosting companies will NOT accept proxies. They are awfully resource intensive and can easily bring shared servers to a stand if they get a decent amount of traffic. If you consideri seriously hosting a proxy, a VPS or dedicated server is a minimal requirement. You need at least 512MB of ram on your server and 1Gb or above is highly recommended. Other thing to look at is the control panel, the famous cPanel, most popular control panel amongst webmasters, is really resource intensive. It can use all 512mb of ram on a Shared VPS Server before your sites are even running. It is better to use Direct Admin or other lightweight control panels, which are more efficient to save resources for your clients and users.

About the disk space: proxies do not take a lot of disk space. This shouldn't be a big concern in choosing a web host. A proxy acts as a relay of data, it plays a middle man of sorts between your users and the websites they wish to visit. This requires all websites use double the normal bandwidth of viewing a website. The first half of the data is your server requesting the website your user wishes to visit. The second half of the data is sending that website’s data back to the user. Popular proxies can eat a lot of bandwidth, make sure you have plenty to spare.

This covers the two main aspects of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. Better processors such as an Intel Core2Duo, Xeon, or AMD Opterons are a huge plus, but generally they only become an issue after ram and bandwidth.

So, what should you be looking for in a web host when choosing one? Price isn't everything. If you want to make money you better be prepared to spend some too. The $5 special plan on a shared server will become a disaster if you plan to use that. In the case a host lets you host your proxies in a shared environment this might sound great and cheap but you have to wonder what else is running and if they are going to allow you to use a lot of resources of the server, like if all other users of the server are using some proxies too! Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all the server resources, and you may not be the one using all those resources and then you will be very unhappy.

If you are going with a dedicated or vps shared server solution as suggested, you probably want good support response times in case something isn't working. And depending on your skills with servers, management may also be a good thing to have so you don’t have to update and patch your server all time. Choosing the host with best uptimes guarantees is also to be considered: an offline server isn’t making money.