Technology Reports

Well, it has now been just over 3 weeks since I launched my first web proxy, and I just wanted to recap a little as to what I have found has and has not worked with building and promoting them.

First, I started with a proxy in a sub-directory of this site and found that it was using a lot of resources. It was also reasonably profitable, so I got another server to put it on. The next problem I had was that It was in a sub-directory and this was causing some other problems. So, when I moved to to the new server, I put it on a sub-domain.

Whatever you do, if you plan on running a proxy or a proxy network, make sure you get a reasonable server to run it on. For the 4 days I was running it on the server with my other sites the performance was terrible and all the other sites on the server were affected as well.

I always planned to set up more than 1 proxy, so a few days later I set up another proxy on the server as well - this was after the first proxy had been running for a bit over a week. I basically duplicated what I did with the first site and just re-wrote a little bit of the content so it reflected the “branding” of the new domain.

Proxy number 3 was put online at the start of week 3, but this time, I tried a few different things with the actual proxy site. I experimented with the colours and layout etc - only time will tell if this will be succesful.

Promotion of the proxys has been a fairly simple process. In all cases, I have submitted them to 2 or 3 common sites including proxy.org The next thing that I did was to submit each proxy to 5 or 6 topsites - making the submissions to different topsites for each proxy. This strategey was to maximise the spread of the traffic sources for each site. The first proxy, I had a couple of myspace bullitens done about the site - and had mixed results. Yes, I had a lot of traffic, but very little return traffic. I basically broke even on that method.

Regarding traffic, I have found that the traffic is reasonably good and continues to grow without further promotion.

Proxy 1 went from nothing to about 3K visitors when I had the myspace bulletins done. It has settled down at around the 300-500 visits/day now.

Proxy 2 went from nothing to around 300 visitors for 1-2 days after launch and dropped off a little. It is slowly improving and now getting around the 500 visits/day as well.

Proxy 3 has only been going for about a week so far and is getting around 200 visits/day - I hope it slowly improves next week.

What I have noted is that the traffic is slowly improving without doing any further promotion after the initial launch.

The daily traffic is normally around the 1200-1500 visits/day during the week and drops off quite a lot over the weekends. My strategey of launching a new proxy each week is quite easy to do and I am currently spending around 2 hours to skin and promote each site. I plan to continue to add a new site each week until I reach the resource limits on the server that I am running. When I get close to fully using the resources, I will do a bit more evaluation of the profitability of the network and if it is going well I’ll keep doing more of the same. After all, for the time and effort I have put in V’s the income made I am pretty happy so far with the results.