Instead, you need a special type of hosting called ‘Proxy Hosting.’ There are several sites that have their servers especially built to host proxies, so you can get hosting from them.

Shared Hosting
While many people tend to go straight to a VPS or Dedicated Server, you can easily run a small proxy network on Shared Hosting. This is perfect for beginners.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)/Dedicated Server
These can be grouped together because the basically have the same specifications. The trick here is that you want a lot of RAM (for those traffic bursts), bandwidth, and great support. You also want a light weight control panel (Don’t go with cPanel, it uses up 256MB of RAM on it’s own).

A minimum of 768MB RAM is recommended, and LxAdmin or DirectAdmin are good control panels.

Once again, make sure that your hosting company allows proxies on their VPS.

While some webmasters look down upon proxies, many are embracing them as a new way to make money. And the thing it, it is extremely easy to make money off of proxies.

Proxies are the ‘now’ type of websites. Unlike blogs and forums, where you work your way up to making money, proxies get traffic and clicks in a snap. This is because people generally use them the day you advertise them, so as soon as you submit to a few toplists expect a few thousand visitors.

However, it is not uncommon to get 50,000 visitors one day, and then 4 the next. Getting the visitors is not the hard part, keeping them is. You may need to spend a little money on advertising in top lists, but you will definitely earn it back no problem.

As mentioned in Legal Issues, proxies are not legal worldwide. Some countries ban the use of proxies. Make sure proxies are legal in your country before attempting to run one.

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

According to the United States Bill of Rights, Amendment 4:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

You reserve the right to stay anonymous and private, and you have the protection of the law against any attacks on your privacy.

Jobs and offices use web filters in order to increase employee productivity. If you are caught using a proxy, it is not impossible that you will get fired. Make sure to check up with your employer whether the use of proxies is allowed.

Also, while many proxies are made by legit webmasters just trying to make money, some are created by hackers. It is not unheard of that a user logged into their MySpace or Facebook account, only to later find out that the password was changed and it was hacked into.

Make sure that the proxy can be trusted, and isn’t going to just steal any data that you enter into it. I personally don’t suggest you enter any financial or important information into web proxies, because you never know.

However, some countries, like China, block the usage of proxies altogether. Before using or starting a proxy, make sure that they are legal in your country. For a fact, they are completely legal in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

With a simple script, a website is able to find out your browser, operating system, and even location. See your IP address? That can be used to track you right down to the computer you are reading from at this very moment.

People who do not want to be seen using the Internet, such as Free Speech activists and criminals may use proxies in order to hide their data. What a proxy does is it assigns random information to you.

Let’s say you live in the United States and use Mozilla Firefox. After using a proxy, somebody trying to track you will learn that you live in Greece and use Netscape Navigator. Unless they are able to circumvent the proxy encryption (not likely), they will not know your real location or information.

Proxies are generally used for four reasons. First, they serve as a cache. Proxies are able to save website data onto their servers, so that next time you visit the website, it will be already loaded for you. This will make the loading time much faster.

Proxies are also used to unblock websites in places like schools, work offices, and libraries. Because you are technically still on the proxy when sending a request to another website, it will appear ‘unblocked’ for you.

People that wish to browse the internet anonymously tend to use proxies. These people can range from free speech activists, criminals, to teenage boys looking on porn sites without getting caught. Proxies are able to scramble the information your computer releases.

Finally, proxies are also used to browse the internet safely. Because proxies are able to remove or encrypt web pages and certain scripts, they lower the chances of you contracting a virus while viewing a web page.