Web proxies are becoming a hot topic amongst web masters at the time of late. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are several 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.

First off, proxy hosting starts with a web host. Most webhosting companies will NOT accept proxies. They are extremely resource intensive as well as can conveniently bring shared servers to a stand still if they get any decent quantity of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy a VPS or dedicated server is a requirement. You’ll 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 most common control panel amongst webmasters is extremely resource intensive and may use all 256mb of ram on a vps before your sites are even running. DirectAdmin and other lighter weight control panels are recommended to save resources for your users.

Disk space, proxies take minimal disk space. This certainly will not be an enormous 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 sites use double the normal bandwidth of viewing a site. The very first half of your data is your server requesting the site your user wishes to visit. Your second half of the data is sending that website’s data back to the user. Popular proxies can eat a great deal of bandwidth, make certain you have plenty to spare.

This covers the 2 main facets of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A reliable processor for example a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a huge plus but generally this may become an issue after ram and bandwidth.

What should you be trying to find in a web host when selecting one? Price isn’t everything. If you want to earn money you better be 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 will need to wonder what else is running should they are going to allow you to make use of a lot of resources of the server. Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all of the server resources, and you may not be the one using all those resources and after that you will be very unhappy.

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