Web proxies are learning to be a hot topic amongst web masters since late. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are lots of factors to be made prior to deciding to seriously jump into the proxy hosting market. You should do your investigation in the event that you are seriously considering joining the ranks of 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 as well as can conveniently bring shared servers to a stand still if they get any decent amount of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy a VPS or dedicated server is a requirement. You will need at least 256MB of ram on your server and 512 or above is extremely recommended. Another thing to be careful of is control panels, cPanel, the best control panel amongst webmasters is very resource intensive and also can utilize 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 certainly will not be a large concern in selecting 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 pages they wish to visit. This requires all websites use double the typical bandwidth of viewing a website. The very first half of the information is your server requesting the website your user wishes to visit. Your second half of the data is sending that website’s data back to the user. Popular cheapest private proxies can eat a whole lot of bandwidth, make sure you have plenty to spare.

This covers the 2 main aspects of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A quality processor such as a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a huge plus but generally it will be an issue after ram and bandwidth.

What should you be searching for in a web host when selecting one? Price isn’t everything. If you want to make 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 need to wonder what else is running should they are going to enable you to use a lot of resources of the server. Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all the server resources, and you might not be the one using all those resources and then 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 something goes wrong. Based on your level of skill with servers, management might also be a good thing to have so you don’t have keep your machine securely patched and running yourself. Uptime guarantees are usually an excellent thing to have, a server that is not online is not making money.