Web proxies are becoming a hot topic amongst web masters by late. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are numerous factors to be made before you decide to seriously jump in to the proxy hosting market. You should do your investigation if you’re seriously considering joining the ranks of private proxy web masters.

To start with, proxy hosting starts with a web host. Most webhosting companies will NOT accept proxies. They may be extremely resource intensive and can also easily bring shared servers to a stand still should they get any decent quantity of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy a VPS or dedicated server is a requirement. You need at least 256MB of ram on your server and 512 or above is especially recommended. Another thing to be cautious of is control panels, cPanel, the best control panel amongst webmasters is very resource intensive and will make use of all 256mb of ram on a vps before your sites are even running. DirectAdmin as well as other lighter weight control panels are highly recommended to save resources for your users.

Disk space, proxies take minimal disk space. This should not be a large concern when choosing a web host. A proxy acts as a relay of data, it plays a middle man of sorts between your users and also the web sites they wish to visit. This requires all web pages use double the standard bandwidth of viewing a site. The very first half of the information is your server requesting the site your user wishes to visit. The next half of the results is sending that website’s data back to the user. Popular proxies can eat a whole lot of bandwidth, ensure you have plenty to spare.

This covers the two main facets of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A quality processor for example a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a huge plus but generally this is going to be an issue after ram and bandwidth.

What should you be looking for in a web host when selecting one? Price isn’t everything. If you want to earn money you better be well prepared to spend some too. The $5 special on a shared server spells disaster if you plan on being successful. If a host lets you host proxies in a shared environment this might sound great and cheap but you should wonder what else is running if they will be going to allow you to use a lot of resources of the server. Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all of the server resources, and also you may not be the one using all those resources and after that you will be very unhappy.

In the event you are going with a dedicated or vps solution as suggested you probably want good support response times in the event that something goes wrong. According to your skill level with servers, management might also be a great thing to have so you don’t have keep your machine securely patched and running yourself. Uptime guarantees will also be a nice thing to have, a server that is not online isn’t making money.