What’s The Deal With Proxies?

March 15th, 2007

A while ago, a friend and I decided we wanted to invest in another website. Not knowing what we wanted to invest in, we headed over to the sitepoint marketplace to look for something interesting to buy.

While we didn’t find anything worthwhile, we were amazed at the amount of proxy sites for sale. Doing a search for the word proxy on sitepoint will yield about 6 pages of proxy sites for sale. At 30 sites per page, that’s (checks fingers) 180 proxy sites for sale.

Now I’ve never needed to use a web proxy site in my life, so my question is: have you? Have you ever used a web proxy? Why? What for? A common answer I’ve heard is for accessing stuff like MySpace at school or work, but I can’t see that being too common. Is it?

Most of these sites for sale seem to use some open source scripts. Mainly php proxy and PageForward.

I couldn’t believe there was such a market, so I decided to test it out. I registered the domain name unblockd.com (note: there’s no e in there) and put up my own little proxy. Of course, I didn’t tell anybody about it until now (note: Also today I added a link to it on web search express).

It would seem that there IS a market for proxies. Without doing a damn thing, I started getting traffic. As a matter of fact, that little adsense ad there actually made enough to cover the cost of the domain name.

So my question is, why do you use a proxy if you do? And why do we need so freaking many of them?

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