Technology Reports

Well, My experiment in Proxy servers came to an end a couple of months ago.

For a while I was running a small number (about 20) proxy’s and my host told me to get rid of them -due to abuse.. As I had a lot of other sites on the server I had no choice but to remove them. I held onto a couple of them and continued to earn a small amount from them, but finally they too were the subject of abuse.

The abuse was in the form of someone logging into an email account from the proxy and sending spam. Guess what IP address appeared in the email headers as the originator - yes, the IP of my server.

So, the only choice I had was to shut down the last proxy I had, which was a shame as the actions of a single person denied the use for the hundreds of legitimate users.

What did I learn about this experience? Well, a lot. I learnt that no matter what, there is always someone who will try and take advantage of any given situation. Providing an online service might earn you a bit of $, but the eventual abuse will make it hardly worthwhile. Running a proxy made me a reasonable amount of money, but only for a short time. I would have been better off devoting my time to a project that would have earnt me a lesser amount, but been capable of earning forever!

Holiday times always see a huge drop in traffic to your proxy websites. It is a fact of life. The biggest users of web proxies are of course students at school or college who want to get to sites such as myspace, facebook and even gmail.

Now, during holiday times you need to think of other ways of promoting your proxy and this is the time to think about SEO. Yes, with a little bit of time and effort (just like with any other website) you can gain valuable links and potentially traffic by thinking a little differently.

Firstly, everyone knows that content is king and all proxy webmasters know that most proxies have almost no content. Time to solve this one - set yourself a challenge and write 5-10 content pages and put them on your proxy website. Target each of these articles around a keyword of site that your proxy users.

Now your site actually has some content - get a few links pointing to each content page. Write a short blog post on your own myspace or facebook will help.

You have probably already done to death the whole submissions to topsites with mixed results - so think differently. What do you do with your other sites? do you not submit them to directories? Well, take the time and do the same with your proxy. Find some niche directories such as the proxyfindr proxy directory or even submit to general directories.

Directory submissions can be made much easier with the Website Submitter - it is a semi-automatic directory submission software package that has over 2000 directories in the database and provides reports to monitor your efforts.

So, when the “normal” traffic starts to drop off on your proxy, start treating it as a regular content website and build your brand so that the Search engines can provide you additional traffic all year round.

Now we have our proxy sites online and running, a plan in place to create another proxy each week and to promote it the next challenge is to kick it into top gear. While so far, the strategey has been OK, the amount of traffic is paying the bills I am in search of different ways of promoting the sites.

At the moment, my strategey has been to build a new site, do around 8-10 submissions to topsites and do a few other submissions to directories and freebie sites. for each new proxy that I am building, I have also started to look for something a little different as well. I have tried getting a few myspace bulletins posted - with mixed results.

My current method is to purchase some targetted visitors - well demographic targetted anyway. I will see how this goes over the next few days to determine if it was succesful.

I guess, just like everyone else, I am looking for that method that works for me and can be repeated for greater success.

I am not saying that the current methods I emply are not good - they are. They involve very little time and end up bringing in some income within a few hours. I am looking for the ways of taking things to the next level so to speak - and find new and interesting sources of free or cheap traffic so I can work less!

Well, I have completed my first month of running some proxy sites and after having gone over the results, I am reasonably pleased with the outcome. Ok, it has been a little over a month, but a complete month has now elapsed, the results are in and I have been able to sit down and see how it all progressed.

Firstly, I started the month with a proxy that was about 5 days old, I purchased a new server to put it (and others) on as it was pushing my current server to the limits! So I had some expenses to contend with. My strategey for the month was to launch a new site over each weekend and have it ready for the new working/school week. Proxy sites get blocked fairly frequently, so I always had a strategey in mind to regularly launch a new site.

Now onto the ledger. My first expense was to purchase a heap of domain names - I went for .info domains as they are nice and cheap to register. The second and biggest expense was a server to host the proxy sites on. Next, I spent a small amount doing various promotions on each newly launched site. My final expense was to get some nice custom header graphics created.

The revenue side of things I took on a 2-pronged approach and that was to display advers on the proxy site pages, and on the actual proxied pages to have a pop-under display. This has so far worked out reasonably well, with about 50% of my income coming from each source. It is always good to have multiple income streams for your sites.

Over the month, I was easily able to make enough to cover my biggest expense of the Server. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that I was also able to cover all other expenses, including registering the domain names (which will get a full Years worth of use), all of the promotion and recover the costs of the design/headers for not only the 4 site I have online but a couple of extra ones as well Once everything was paid for it left a small profit.

Now, I have 4 proxy sites contributing to this income and only 1 is older than 1 month. The other 3 came online at various times during this month. One of the sites is only 4 days old and hardly contributed to the bottom line. As I plan to continue down the path I have already started on, I would hazard a guess that next month will be even better. I will have the current 4 proxy’s bringing in an income for a Full month, and I will deploy another 4 or 5 new sites as well, further improving my chances of an increased income.

Now a reflection on how much work was involved. I had to set up and configure a new server and I had to skin and promote each new site. The server took around 4-5 hours of effort to set up and secure and each site took around an hour to skin and about 1-2 hours to promote. Promotion includes things like submitting to topsites and directories and doing a few link exchanges.

If I take the time I spent into consideration for this month, then I was really working for very little return. I would have earned more flipping burgers. This is not to say that I won’t continue, but it is more of an observation that building and running proxy sites is not about immediate and fast profits. Just like any other web business, you need to work at it and grow it from month to month. I am guessing that after 3-4 months of doing pretty much the same as I have been till now will see a reasonable return on the time I will be putting into this whole proxy business.

Building and running a proxy network is a bit of a risk for someone who has no experience. If things had gone badly, I would have had expenses totalling a couple of hundred $$ and not be able to pay. It is a fair bet, that someone with a little bit of experience in running websites and running Servers, has $500-1000 to fall back on to cover the first 3 months expenses (in full) should be able to build a proxy network to compliment their other online income streams.

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.

This morning when I got up, I found I had a message in my inbox that had came from the contact form on one of my proxy sites.

The message was short, sharp and to the point: it said

Your TechnologyReports Web Proxy has been blocked by Websense.

So, off to see if it had been blocked, I logged into websense to check it out. and sure enough on a database update on the 15th Feb 2007 the site was blocked. Now, this site has only been live and online for about 2 1/2 weeks and the search revealed the following:

URL: http://bypass.technologyreports.info
Category: Proxy Avoidance
Database version: 92731
Database date: 15 Feb 2007
Product used: Websense Enterprise® v6.2

Now, I understand why people who run Proxy sites don’t just run 1 - they have literally hundreds of domain names.

This means that all the effort I put into getting the site known has probably already come to a halt and I need to consider setting up another domain as a Proxy. What I will look at and consider, is to set up some additional sub-domains so that hte technologyreports proxy can continue to work. I just need to experiment with all possible solutions and see how it goes.

The good thing is that by having a blog as the main page of the domain, people searching for technologyreports will probably end up here on this blog, and as long as I continue to update a post and link here, I can probably change the sub-domain of the proxy fairly regularly and give people who use the proxy the freedom to do just that without being filtered. Let me know what you think!

Well, I found a bit of a weird problem with the phproxy script.

I had it installed in a sub-directory on this site at http://technologyreports.info/bypass/ but it was not working too well when going to some sites. well, one site - MySpace. When you logged into myspace via the proxy, it was giving an error.

In order to fix the problem, I had to put the proxy into a sub-domain and now it all works. It is now located at http://bypass.technologyreports.info/ and it lets you log into myspace.

I guess that I need to do some more research on this and find out why!