June 10, 2023

What’s The Deal With Proxies?

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?

About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com

Comments

  1. Mr. Jones

    Please register your blog posts with spellcheck before you tell us what sites you’ve “regisetered” for.

    Thank you.

  2. Thanks Ehrich.

    I’m often in a hurry when I post. Most of my posts are typed raw in a firefox extension and sent to the blog remotely. I guess I need to use something with a spellcheck, or at least take time to reread them eh?

    Anybody know of a good wordpress spellcheck plugin?