ToddW Blog

This is a very basic run down of what’s required to start a succesful proxy website.

•  A dedicated server.
  I suggest using a server that does not house any other websites because a proxy site (yes only one) can easily utilize all the system resources. When a proxy site goes slow the users will pause and then continue surfing where-as other sites the visitor normally exits. Overloading a proxy site server is still not a good idea but I’ve found the visitors are much more forgiving w/slow loading than of other site types. Server types… you can basically start out with anything like say a P4 with 2gb of RAM and 100mbit connection, even cogent bandwidth works great for proxy websites. If you start with a smaller single processor server you should be ready to upgrade in the near future.
• Dedicated Server Control Panel
  Having cPanel/WHM on the server is not a probelm however it does use system resources so if you can get by without one I would suggest NOT using a control panel on your proxy server.
• Blocking countries
  If you plan to use adsense or simply want to block countries which mainly lookup adult material then I HIGHLY suggest installing MaxMind Apache Module. This will allow you to easily block countries in your .htaccess file of your proxy site.
  If you block a country SEND THEM TO ANOTHER PROXY so they can still do what they want to. You could even send them all to another one of your proxy sites with no ads on it, let them make it popular with OTHER countries then you can block them and re-direct them again
• Quality Site Layout
  You need a proxy site layout that will earn you money, who cares how pretty it is. Colleen has some very pretty phproxy themes but the majority of them are VERY poor examples of good adsense layouts. This proxy site has another commonly seen proxy layout which is very well setup and yields a VERY HIGHT CTR. Don’t include images, or big headers on your proxy site they will only slow down the loading of the homepage and distract the visitors from using your site or clicking your ads.
• Make the money!
  You of course want to make money on your proxy website… I suggest AdSense for the homepage and AdBrite or privately sold ads for the proxified pages. Adversal rates have gone down a TON and are not even worth using anymore. CPA ads from great places such as azoogleads perform poorly on proxy sites. (But they kickass on other websites.) If your proxy gets a HIGH number of Chinese or Iranian visitors it may be good to block them with MaxMind in .htaccess as there have been rumors of adsense blocking people for invalid clicks from these countries because of a high number of clicks from the same IP.
• Modify the phproxy script
  If you use the script right “out of the box” it will allow proxified pages to eat up your bandwidth and users to hotlink through your proxy.
  I also suggest you modify phproxy to block downloading of certain files to help prevent large bandwidth bills. (How-Tos coming for these)
• Block Search Bots
  If your proxy site takes off and people start linking to pages through your proxy the search engines will eventually start eating this up and causing MASSIVE server load and bandwidth usage. For instance google at one time was using ~2gb a day to spyder ONE of my proxy sites. The said proxy had about 400,000 pages indexed in google, google was hitting 70,000 pages per-day and it was ranking higher than some of hte websites it proxified. Sure this sounds great but the couple hundred visitors it was gaining from the search engine were going directly to proxified pages which earn a LOT less than the homepage wit the high paying google ads, not to mention google was almost taking down my dual processor server! I suggest you block googlebot in your robots.txt file.