Web proxies are being a hot topic amongst web masters by late. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are plenty of things to consider to be made prior to deciding to seriously jump into the proxy hosting market. You should do your research in the event that you are seriously considering joining the ranks of proxy web masters.

First off, proxy hosting starts with a web host. Most webhosting companies will NOT accept cheapest proxies. They’re extremely resource intensive as well as can conveniently bring shared servers to a stand still whenever they get any decent amount of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy a VPS or dedicated server is a requirement. You may need at least 256MB of ram on your server and 512 or above is very recommended. Something else to be cautious of is control panels, cPanel, the most common control panel amongst webmasters is very resource intensive and may utilize all 256mb of ram on a vps before your sites are even running. DirectAdmin as well as other lighter weight control panels are recommended to save resources for your users.

Disk space, proxies take minimal disk space. This should not be a tremendous 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 web sites use double the normal bandwidth of viewing a web page. The first half of the results is your server requesting the site your user wishes to visit. The other half of the results is sending that website’s data back to the user. Popular proxies can eat a lot of bandwidth, make sure you’ve got plenty to spare.

This covers the two main aspects of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A reliable processor such as a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a huge plus but generally this will become an issue after ram and bandwidth.

What should you be searching for in a web host when selecting one? Price is not everything. If you want to make money you better be prepared to spend some too. The $5 special on a shared server spells disaster in case 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 should they are going to permit you to utilize a lot of resources of the server. Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all the server resources, and also you might not be the one using all those resources and after that you will be very unhappy.

If you’re 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 skill level with servers, management could also be a good thing to have so you don’t have keep your machine securely patched and running yourself. Uptime guarantees are usually a good thing to have, a server that’s not online is not making money.