Kiloserve Proxy Hosting

I’ll go into SEO later on so bare with me for a while. In my last two posts I explained how to advertise your proxy through toplists and social media, yet I am not convinced about the effectiveness of these two methods. I have tried both and one of them had a negative effect.

I paid someone to submit my proxies to 100 toplists and once I added the back-link code on my proxies I noticed a drop of traffic. Some 20% of the traffic I got on this proxy simply disappeared. I think the reason was the slow loading of the index proxy page which was packed with all those toplists logos, buttons etc. I promptly removed the code and my traffic recovered in a couple of days. I find that 99% of toplists only cause trouble while there are a few if them that actually bring traffic. I somehow got on some of these which kept sending me consistent traffic day after day.

The other problem is the type of traffic they bring: lets face it, Middle East traffic does not bring any revenue. North American, European and Australian traffic is high quality. Why? Simple because it converts to sales for Google Ads advertisers. I am not saying go block all Middle Eastern traffic. You do need some of that to build up momentum. Two of my proxies became PR3 with mostly Iranian traffic and they consistently brought good revenue because they attracted good quality traffic.

Social media (Stumble, Digg etc) is a different story. As far as proxies is concerned they help in two ways:

1. To get it indexed quickly
2. To bring a surge in traffic and build up momentum

Getting indexed is very important for SEO (see below) and getting a surge of traffic is always good to build momentum and attract more traffic.

Which brings us to Search Engine Optimization. In simple words for proxies this means optimizing your its content and html to make it easy to find when someone is searching for a proxy through a search engine. This includes doing keyword research, adding meta-tags, title-tags, and getting back-links to your proxy.

This kind of advertising/promotion is medium to long term but it will bring the best results because the highest quality traffic comes from search engines. Proxies which receive traffic from search engines enjoy high revenues.

There is an excellent article on a new proxy forum Clickalite which explains in simple words what SEO is and what to do to achieve higher traffic and revenues.

Advertising your proxies through groups, namely Yahoo and Google groups is one of the best ways of getting traffic to your proxies. Why? Simply because it’s targeted traffic: people who sign-up at these groups are people who want to receive new proxies in the inbox every day. The University Kid wrote a simple guide for starting with proxies which I believe complements the one I wrote. In there he includes some groups you can use to submit your proxies. They’ll definitely bring you traffic.

The University Kid outlines some other nice methods besides groups for advertising your proxy like social media, social networking, link exchanges etc.

Give them a try and let us know how they worked out for you.

Advertising is the trickiest part in the proxy business. Proxies make money from advertising, so you need to drive traffic which clicks on your ads to your proxy. One way to do that is through proxy toplists. These are websites which list proxies and most of them are free. A few of them can command a fee because they are very popular (e.g. proxy.org).

This technique of driving traffic is very controversial [Read more →]

Blocking traffic to your proxy from specific countries is debatable. We are supposed to offer a way out to people who are blocked behind filtering software (college students, people in countries under oppressed regimes) while at the same time, we need to pay off our expenses and make some profit as well.

Based on my personal experience, the only traffic that I found as abusive is Chinese. China provided for 20% of my proxy visits yet it used 80% of bandwidth. I am not sure what they viewing through proxies but that’s a bit too much.

There are a few options to block countries: [Read more →]

Hotlinking in the proxy business happens when someone goes directly to a website without going through your web proxy’s home page. Hotlinking harms you and your proxy in two ways:

1. People linking directly to images and/or videos are using/stealing your bandwidth
2. You are losing advertising revenue since people go directly to the webpage without coming through your home page which holds the majority of your advertising.

PHProxy supposedly has hotlink prevention incorporated into it. It could be just me but I never managed to make it work. Instead you can add a piece of code to achieve hotlink prevention. Same for CGI-Proxy and Zelune.

[Read more →]

Today I wrote a post on namepros forum which I though is worth posting here. I have changed the structure and the text a bit to match the Kiloserve blog but it’s substance is the same. I will be expanding on the important ideas below, providing information on how go about with each step e.g. code, where and how to advertise etc

If you are new to proxies, this will be very helpful. If you are into proxies for a while then this probably won’t add much more to your knowledge but might give you a couple of nice tips.

To start off in the proxy business:

1. Register a domain
   • info domains are cheap and will do just fine to start you off. Chose a memorable name, one that users will easily remember to type in directly in their browser without having to search for a link off a website, email or search engine.
   • com domains are more expensive but have the advantage that can get more traffic since they are easier to “access” (.coms can be reached by simply typing the domain name and hitting Ctrl+Enter). They are usually used to build traffic and PR and you can eventually sell links on them for extra cash. [Read more →]

Not many web hosts allow proxy hosting. Estimates say that only about 2% do. The main reasons for this is:

• Proxies use a lot of bandwidth so if a web host oversells his bandwidth (a usual practice amongst web hosts) thinking that not all his customers will use the traffic they’ve bought, they are in trouble.
• Proxies are CPU and RAM intensive, i.e. they use lots of these. Web hosts running proxies and other types of websites on their servers will find that non-proxy websites are disadvantaged. Servers running proxies cannot be oversold in terms or RAM or CPU, otherwise downtime will follow

In others words, proxy hosting is not for all web hosts. The servers used must be powerful enough to handle the load and the web host must not oversell bandwidth, CPU or RAM.