You can create it for your personal use (for accessing blocked sites from office for example). This is created using Google App Engine and, contrary to what you assume, the process is quite simple.

1. Go to appengine.google.com and sign-in using your Google Account.
2. Click the “Create an Application” button. Since this is your first time, Google will send a verification code via SMS to your mobile phone number. Type the code and you’re all set to create apps with Google App Engine.
3. Choose a sub-domain* that will host your proxy server. Make sure the domain is available, agree to the Google Terms and click save. The sub-domain is also your App ID that will uniquely identify your proxy application (in video labnol-proxy-server is used as the App ID though you are free to choose any other unique name).
4. Now that we have reserved the ID, it’s time to create and upload the proxy server application to Google App Engine. Go to python.org, download the 2.6.4 MSI Installer and install Python.
5. Once Python is installed, go to code.google.com, download the Google App Engine SDK for Python and install it.
6. Download file from here img.labnol.org/files/proxy.zip and extract it to some folder on your desktop. The zip file, for the curious, contains a couple of text files (written in HTML and Python) that you can read with notepad.
7. Start the Google App Engine Launcher program from the desktop and set the right values under Edit –> Preferences (see screenshot above).
8. Click File –> Add Existing Application under the Google App Launcher program and browse to the directory that you created in Step 6. Click the Edit button and replace “YOUR_APP_ID” with the ID (sub-domain) that you reserved in Step 3.
9. Click Deploy and your online proxy server is now ready for use.

You can edit the main.html file to change the appearance of your proxy server and you can even add Analytics and AdSense code to your proxy server in case it gets popular on the web. The application is currently open to all users but you can add a layer of authentication so that only users who are logged-in into their Google Accounts can use your web proxy server.

If you have made any changes to your HTML files, you can upload the latest version to Google App Engine either by clicking the “Deploy” button again or use the following command — appcfg.py update <app-directory>

Notes:

• This proxy works with Flash videos (like YouTube and ABC News) though not with Hulu.
• App Engine TOS does not allow you to split your app across multiple accounts to make use of the free quotas. So technically, the mirror of the proxy is in violation of the TOS.
• As some of you have suggestions, domain with the word “proxy” or “proxies” are banned at workplaces so you may include them in your proxy address.
• Though there exist proxy servers for accessing secure sites, this is a basic proxy server that won’t work with sites that require logins (eg, Gmail or Hotmail).

• PHP proxy: Start by downloading phpproxy and unpack it in the local directory of your hard drive. Next you will need to upload the script to your webspace and open the new url to make sure that its working. Many files with the name ‘proxy’ in them are barred so you may want to change the file name to something new. Next you will need to open the script and enter the IP of your clients computer so that only he and you can access the internet through this proxy. Alternatively you can also use a .htaccess file so that users will need to enter a username and password. All the information related to phpproxy is freely available online.
• CGI proxy: If you are using free web hosting you may not be able to go for a cgiproxy since many of them do not offer cgi. The procedure involves the same steps as above downloading and unpacking the .cgi file. There are many setting which can be used to your advantage here for instance you may only let texts to go through and no images. Again a wealth of information is available online that will help you set up the cgiproxy without too much trouble.

Promoting your proxy site

This will be the most difficult part as whether there is traffic to your proxy site will depend on how you promote it and without traffic, it will not be easy to make money. There are basically a few things you can do:

• Posting your proxy url in yahoo & google group
• Submit your proxy url to proxy.org
• Posting Bulletin with your proxy url
• Comment on blogs
• Submit to social bookmarking sites
• Submit to proxy toplists
• Ask friends to link to your links

Every of the above steps that you do will help to create a backlink back to your proxy site and at the same time, provide an opportunity for others to click through the link and bring them to your site. The amount of traffic may be minimal at the beginning, but, as times goes on, slowly you will build up more and more backlinks and it will help your site to rank higher in search engine.

Once you have everything in place you can use your site to make money. There are several ways to do so. One is to charge users who log in through your proxy a small fee, and many are more than willing to pay. Or you can offer the services for free and make your riches from Google adsense. This is what most other proxy service providers do. Of course don’t expect your proxy server to stay up and running for long since it will be banned as soon as it is discovered in which case you will just have to change your IP and get back into business. This can easily be achieved with the help of free software.

Making Money out of your Proxy Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need. The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic For your Proxy Site is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow. So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic for your Proxy Site you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated. This scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Add Affiliate Programs for Your Proxy Site

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site. The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage. When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

Getting high in the Search Engines for competitive keywords for a proxy can make a bog standard proxy an excellent one. It can increase its value considerably and increase your profit by even more! There are many on page and off page things that you will need to do to get good Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). These techniques can take a few months to be reflected in search engines so you have to decide whether your going to make a quick proxy or a long lasting one. If your going to make a quick turn around proxy it may not be worth doing some of these techniques, but if your making a long last one, this is defiantly worth a read.

1. Firstly pick some good keywords. You want keywords that are highly searched. Use the google adwords tool for finding the best ones. Obviously don’t choose one which is millions/month like “proxy” as you will never get onto the front page for it. Pick something with around 10k to 70k/month searches.
2. Choose a domain that includes keywords like the ones your going to optimise for. Preferably get a dot com (.com) domain as they rank best but others will rank well if you optimise well.
3. Upload your script to your site and change the title and meta tags. Make your title the keywords you are optimizing for and separate them in order of importance separated by this “|” or another separating key.  Then do the same in the meta keywords but separate the phrases by a comma.  Finally make a good descriptive meta description including the keywords you want to optimise for. Also make sure all of your pages have different titles.
4. Make a unique paragraph above your proxy URL box. Include your keywords but don’t make it obvious what they are. Don’t make it spammy, it has to make good sense and read well.
5. Now it is time to build good links. You need as many incoming links as possible with your keyword. Your keyword should be the anchor text. Its best to have a few different keywords as if they are all the same, the links could be considered spam. It is also good practice to have the title of the link the keyword aswell.
6. Build these links slowly over the weeks and months. Submit your proxy to a few directories and proxy lists daily, maximum of about 20 a day, consistently.  This should build your proxies inbound links nicely.  Your proxy will then get crawled more often and move up the SERPs consistently.
7. Finally it is good to optimize for several keywords to get maximum traffic.

So to conclude you have to do a fair bit of work to get good results, but if you get on the front page of google for a good keyword, you will get serious traffic. The techniques above are very general. There are many smaller, and much more complicated things to do. If you see your proxy going up and down in the SERPs then this is probably because the Search Engine is having a reshuffle, called the “Google Dance” with google.  Finally search engines often change there algorithms, so keep up the SEOing to stay on the front pages.

The single domain will benefit from higher rankings if links to the subdomains are funneled to the main one. Luckily, there is a technique to do this — reverse proxies.

A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed in a server network. Typically, reverse proxy sits in front of the web server, receives all requests, does some special processing (such as caching) and forwards the requests to the actual servers. Besides main security reason (the proxy server may provide an additional layer of defense) a reverse proxy can be used to map URLs to different servers, and this feature comes in very handy for SEO.

You can use Apache’s mod_proxy for this. Here is a sample configuration

ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPass /blog http://blog.sitename.com
ProxyPassReverse /forum http://forum.sitename.com

Instead of directing users to blog.sitename.com, you write a reverse proxy rule to send requests for sitename.com/blog to the internal server blog.sitename.com. You can do the same for forums, chat, e-commerce systems, and so on. It is completely transparent to the user (and search engines) that the website is divided among multiple servers. Note that each web server will need to be isolated completely for the security to work. If someone breaks into the blog because the software hasn’t been updated, for instance, at least he won’t get to the e-commerce system.

Crowds seems to have been replaced by a a second generation project called Tor.

Tor is free software and an open network that protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Tor employs cryptography in a multi-layered manner (hence the onion routing analogy), ensuring perfect forward secrecy between routers. A user of the Tor network runs a proxy server on his computer. Internet-facing software can then access Tor through a SOCKS interface. Once inside a Tor network, the traffic is sent from router to router, the Tor software periodically negotiating a virtual circuit through the Tor network, ultimately reaching an exit node at which point the cleartext packet is forwarded on to its original destination. Viewed from the destination, the traffic appears to originate at the Tor exit node. More information can be found on it’s website torproject.org.

Tor doesn’t magically encrypt all of your Internet activities, though.

Virtual Private Networking (VPN) implements private networks over public infrastructure. VPN’s are used by business for legitimate reasons all the time. It has attracted the attention of many organizations looking to both expand their networking capabilities and reduce their costs.

A Virtual Private Network uses tunneling technology to establish private connections through public networks like the Internet. The private nature of a VPN means that the data travelling over the VPN is not generally visible to, or is encapsulated from, the underlying network traffic. This is done with strong encryption, as VPN’s are commonly deployed to be high-security “network tunnels”.

An Internet VPN solution uses a client/server design works as follows:

1. A remote host (client) wanting to log into the company network first connects to any public Internet Service Provider (ISP).
2. Next, the host initiates a VPN connection to the company VPN server. This connection is made via a VPN client installed on the remote host.
3. Once the connection has been established, the remote client can communicate with the internal company systems over the Internet just as if it were a local host.

VPN clients communicate with VPN servers utilizing a number of specialized protocols.

The industry group ‘Virtual Private Networking Consortium’ have defined two types of VPN classifications, Secure VPNs and Trusted VPNs. Trusted VPNs differ from secure VPNs in that they do not provide security features such as data confidentiality through encryption. Secure VPNs however do not offer the level of control of the data flows that a trusted VPN can provide such as bandwidth guarantees or routing.

Anonymous surfing allows you to surf the web without leaving a trail of particulars about your browser, your computer system, your country, IP address, list of fonts installed on your computer etc. This is usually done by entering the address (URL) of the site you wish to go to at the proxy the free anonymous surfing proxy site, and that site will retrieve the page for you and present it to you. The site you visit will not receive any particulars about your system or your IP address because the proxy will not have transmitted such particulars to it.

If you are particularly concerned about privacy and anonymity while surfing, you should note that, when using most of the free anonymous surfing facilities, the URLs you visit are easily gleaned by others. If absolute privacy is your concern, you’d better take a look at commercial solutions which will encrypt all your traffic (including your URLs) in a Virtual Private Network (VPN) giving you privacy from people snooping your connection when you’re connected via wireless broadband, and even privacy from your ISP. Some of these commercial solutions may provide other benefits as well, such as encrypting your email, internet messaging (IM) and chats, etc.

Proxy hosting seems like a challenge, especially for beginners. After all, you need to deal with things like Server Types, Bandwidth, and Price.

Based on server types, you will have 3 different hosting plans:

• Shared hosting means one web server hosts multiple websites. All of those sites are competing for CPU Time, Memory Space, and Network Bandwidth. So the performance of your proxy site largely depends on how well your hosting company allocates and optimizes the resources.
• VPS provides a virtual private server with guaranteed system resources. Your proxy site still shares the web server with others, but you can get guaranteed resources like Memory Space and CPU Time. Plus you are given a ROOT access to freely install your own software and manage server environment.
• Dedicated hosting let you own the whole server box, so you have enough power to host more proxy sites. Moreover, you are allowed to adjust some fundamental server settings to gain the maximum system performance.

Obviously, the price of those 3 hosting plans is totally different. While a cheap shared plan may cost you $5/Month, a decent dedicated server often charge you over $200/Month. VPS is often considered as a hybrid of Shared Hosting and Dedicated Server. It offers more resources and controls as Dedicated Server while costs much less as Shared Hosting.

Best choice for beginners is to start with a shared proxy hosting. Doing so, you not only save some money but also avoid the hassle to set up the server environment by yourself. There are a few companies who provide shared hosting for proxies. A lot of hosting providers don’t like hosting proxies on shared accounts because running a proxy site takes too much memory space, CPU time, and network bandwidth. Therefore, before you sign up for any shared hosting plan, just make sure it allows proxy.

The best route to go down would be to purchase a dedicated server or virtual private server (vps). But still there are questions come, as the memory of VPS is still questionable. If you are holding a high traffic proxy then it is really too much vulnerable. In Dedicated the same question comes, as for high traffic proxies, 1 or 2 GB RAM isn’t quite enough untill you run your proxy servers through a VPN. And the last thing comes in mind is pricing. Dedicated and VPS both costs a lot rather then Shared Hosting services.

Once you get some candidates, you need to evaluate them based on some important aspects as follows:

• Customer Reviews – How well existing customers think about this host, such as Server Uptime & Reliability, Technical Support, and Customer Support.
• Bandwidth – How much network traffic is allowed per month? For a new proxy site with 100 – 300 daily visits, you may need at least 50GB. If you want to host multiple proxy sites under one plan, 200GB is a good number to start with. A high traffic proxy with 3,000 visits often needs 1,000GB.
• Price -You need to compare not only the hosting fee but also the server setup cost, domain registration fee, and add-on service charge. On the other hand, check if there are any coupon codes or promotion programs that you can apply. The typical price range for a Shared Proxy Hosting is $5 – $30, for VPS is $20 – $90, and for Dedicated Server is $80 – $500.
• Policy – How long is the Money Back Guarantee? Can you cancel the service any time? Is there any minimum contract period? How much dose it cost for the traffic over use?
• Features – How powerful is the web server
  • Memory: Usually for a Shared Hosting Plan, it is hard to guarantee how much memory will be assigned to your proxy, but for VPS and Dedicated server, you will look for at least 512MB, ideally 2GB above.
  • CPU: Proxies have a huge about the CPU usage on a server. As long as the server is not too old, its CPU should do the job well. What you care about is the number of CPU. For shared hosting and VPS, the server should have at least 4-8 CPUs to power multiple sites, for Dedicated Server, you will look for 2-4 CPUs as the starting point.
  • Web Space: Unlike other content sites, your proxy may not need huge hard-drive space. For a medium traffic proxy site, 5GB should be good enough as long as you clean up the temporary files generated by caching and logging on the regular basis.
• Other features – What platform is it based on (Linux, Windows)? Does it have everything your proxy script requires (e.g. PHP, cURL)?

Based on your budget, expectation, and experience, you may host your web proxy site on Shared Web Server, VPS, or Dedicated Server.

A proxy server is a software program that enables multiple computers to share a single internet connection. A properly functioning and secure proxy server only accepts connections from the local addresses on the local area network that it shares the Internet connection for, and then handles the sending and recieving of requests on the Internet.

An “open” or insecure proxy server will accept any requests from any computer (whether on the local area network it’s supposed to be sharing the internet connection for or any computer on the internet) to share the internet connection. This enables any user with sufficient knowlege to use your internet connection for whatever they want if you have an insecure proxy server running.

In most cases an open proxy is unknown to the server owner. This can result from misconfiguration of proxy software running on the computer, or from infection with malware (viruses, trojans or worms) designed for this purpose. There are hundreds of thousands of open proxies online. Many open proxies run very slowly, while other times the speed may change from fast to slow every minute.

Some proxy-websites actively scan for such open proxy servers. Proxy scanning is pretty much having software connect to every IP in a range on a given port to test them to see if they have SQUID or another proxy installed. Active scanning for proxies may be detected by Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and considered as illegal activity.  That’s why many proxy sites come and go very quickly, except for those sites that use legal methods to search for proxies: free online proxy lists, the headers of spam mail, web server log files etc.

The primary argument against open proxies is that their owners may not have intended for them to be used by the public. However, intent is a difficult thing to judge, especially when you’re talking to a computer. By running a service on a machine accessible to the public, without restricting access to that service, a proxy’s administrator is not explicitly denying that service to the public.

In a sense, a proxy server is just like a web server, an FTP server, or any other net service: if it’s running and accepting connections, it’s fair game. The internet is a public network, and if you’re running a server you can hardly be surprised when someone uses it.

According to to U.S. law, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers) applies only when anyone who knowingly accesses a computer without authorization or has knowingly exceeds his authorized access on that computer. Because an opened proxy, by default, allows connections and use of the service by anyone in the WWW, its administrator has essentially authorized everyone to use the proxy.

Because open proxies are often implicated in abuse, a number of methods have been developed to detect them and to refuse service to them.

UltraSurf implements almost all browser functions based on HTTP and user needs, such as browsing websites, login and posting on web forums, using Web mail, uploading and downloading data files, real time audio, video and other multimedia programs, etc. Ultrasurf does not need any skill and any one only need to run this small application and everything is done though it is for Internet Explorer but for Mozilla FireFox you need an additional plugin “wjbutton_en.xpi” to be installed in browser.

After installation of this plugin for Mozilla a small tab on bottom right site of Firefox window as “WJ Enabled” will be installed and clicking on it will turn it to green means now Firefox is configured to use bypass proxy server and re-clicking on it will change it to red thus disabling it. Note that for Ultrasurf in Mozilla to work properly you need to have running the version of Ultrasurf for Internet Explorer in the background.

JAP JonDo is a free, open-source and highly portable (Java-based) client software for accessing the JonDonym services. It’s an excellent piece of proxy software which can help you bypass most of firewalls. JAP JonDo is easy to install and easy to use. It’s fast, uses very less CPU resources and barely slows down your internet speed and works like a treat. Further No registry settings have to be changed, and administration rights are not needed, neither for installation, nor for running the program. The software is open source and free for use.

JAP Anon Proxy provides the functionality to surf the web without being observed. This means that neither the requested server nor any observer on the Internet can know which user has viewed which web page. Since many users make use of the anon service at the same time, the internet connections of each user are hidden among those of all the other users. Every user could have been responsible for any connection. Nobody, no outstanding person, no other user, not even the operator of the AN.ON service can determine which internet connections were requested by a certain user. In short, it’s a must have proxy software.

Proxifier is a program that allows network applications that do not support working through proxy servers to operate through an HTTPS or SOCKS proxy or a chain of proxy servers.

There are many network applications that do not support working through proxy servers and thus cannot be used behind a LAN or firewall(s). These can compromise corporate privacy and lead you to many other restrictions. Proxifier solves all of these problems and gives you the opportunity to work with your favorite software without any restrictions. Additionally, it lets you gain extra control over network security, create a proxy tunnel and add more power to network functionality.

With Proxifier you can work with any Internet client (browsers, FTP, IRC, BitTorrent, messengers, telnet, SSH, video/audio, games…) through a network that is separated from Internet by a firewall (only one open port is required for a proxy tunnel to bypass firewall).

Proxifier will provide you with added privacy in all your Internet activities. An example is sending and receiving email through a proxy server or by chaining multiple proxy servers together. Proxifier supports all mail clients while allowing you to remain anonymous.

SOCKS is a protocol is used by some proxy servers. The SOCKS protocol allows a client (such as a web browser) to ask a server to download a file for it, rather than downloading the file directly. Most SSH clients can act as a SOCKS proxy server, securely tunnelling requests through your SSH session, making an ordinary (insecure) web request from your Ubuntu computer.

Using the command-line SSH client, you should activate SOCKS by doing:
ssh -C -D 1080 user@host

-D refers to Dynamic port forwarding, and 1080 is the standard SOCKS port. You can use a different port if you prefer, but you should choose a port in the range 1024 to 49151, inclusive.

-C enables Compression, which speeds the tunnel up when proxying mainly text-based information (like web browsing), but can slow it down when proxying binary information (like downloading files).

There is also a brief discussion in the PuTTY manual page about how to get PuTTY to act as a SOCKS proxy server.

Once you have set your SOCKS proxy up, your applications can use a SOCKS proxy on the computer you are connecting from. For example, in Firefox:

• go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Connection -> Settings…
• check “Manual proxy configuration”
• make sure “Use this proxy server for all protocols” is cleared
• clear “HTTP Proxy”, “SSL Proxy”, “FTP Proxy”, and “Gopher Proxy” fields
• enter “127.0.0.1″ or “localhost” for “SOCKS Host”, and “1080″ (or whatever port you chose) for Port.

You can also set Firefox to use the DNS through that proxy, so even your DNS lookups are secure:

• Type in about:config in the Firefox address bar
• Find the key called “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” and set it to true

The SOCKS proxy will stop working when you close your SSH session. You will need to change these settings back to normal in order for your browser to work again.

Here is video tutorial of using SSH dynamic port forwarding and a SOCKS proxy (port 7777) to browse securely with HTTP traffic encrypted within a SSH tunnel. Useful if you have access to a SSH server and are using web browsers in an unsafe environment eg cafes, airports etc.

SOCKS is an Internet protocol that facilitates the routing of network packets between client-server applications via a proxy server. Though this protocol was developed long ago enough, it is rather new (compared to the HTTP proxy). SOCKS allows to work with any protocols. A socks proxy simply transfers data from a client to a server, not penetrating into this data contents (therefore it can work with HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, NNTP, etc.).

As SOCKS (as it was already marked above) transfers all data from a client to a server, nothing adding from itself, from the point of view of a web-server, a socks proxy is a client. Therefore anonymity of this type of proxy servers is really always absolute.

At present time there exist 2 versions of the SOCKS protocol: 4 and 5. The 4th version, as it appeared earlier, is more widespread. However, now the 5th version is also supported by many popular programs such as ICQ (old ICQ versions, in general, could use only SOCKS proxies), Napster, AudioGalaxy, EeDoonkey2000 (MP3 files downloaders) etc. Generally speaking, as a SOCKS proxy can “proxy” any TCP / UDP protocol, it could be used also by mail programs, but they do not do it. Therefore, for such programs (which cannot work with socks) there was developed a special software automatically enabling TCP and UDP networking client applications to traverse a SOCKS server. The most popular program is the SocksCap. It allows to capture all traffic of a program and to route it onto a SOCKS proxy 4 or 5.

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol that defines how webserver software can delegate the generation of webpages to a console application. Such applications are known as CGI scripts; they can be written in any programming language, although scripting languages are often used. For use of a CGI proxy you do not need to change your browser settings, to install additional programs or to make something else more complex. It is enough, if one opens a web page of CGI proxy in a browser, enters a required URL into the address field and press the “Go” button, then you will get onto page, which URL you have specified to a CGI proxy. But address of this page (in the address line) from the point of view of your computer will be another, something like this: http://www.cgi-proxy.com/http/www.your-url.com/path/. CGI proxy supports HTTP and (sometimes) FTP and HTTPS protocols. As for anonymity, CGI proxies are the same, as the HTTP proxies. The disadvantages in usage of the CGI proxies are presence of additional advertising (which adds a CGI proxy itself, they simply exist at the expense of such advertising), a limited FTP / HTTPS support (not always supported) and sometimes a CGI proxy do not allow to view pictures.

Proxy types comparsion table: