Web proxies are learning to be a hot topic amongst web masters at the time of late. They appear to be easy money and traffic but there are numerous things to consider to be made before you seriously jump into the proxy hosting market. You should do your investigation in the event that you are seriously considering joining the ranks of proxy web masters.

First off, proxy hosting starts with a web host. Most webhosting companies will NOT accept proxies. They may be extremely resource intensive as well as can quickly bring shared servers to a stand still if they get any decent quantity of traffic. For anyone seriously considering hosting a proxy a VPS or dedicated server is a requirement. You may need at least 256MB of ram on your server and 512 or above is very recommended. Something else to be mindful of is control panels, cPanel, the most common control panel amongst webmasters is very resource intensive and may make use of all 256mb of ram on a vps before your sites are even running. DirectAdmin as well as other lighter weight control panels are strongly suggested to save resources for your users.

Disk space, proxies take minimal disk space. This certainly will not be an enormous concern when choosing a web host. A proxy acts as a relay of data, it plays a middle man of sorts between your users as well as the web sites they wish to visit. This requires all sites use double the typical bandwidth of viewing a website. The first half of the results is your server requesting the web site your user wishes to visit. Your second half of the data is sending that website's data back to the user. Popular proxies can eat a lot of bandwidth, make sure you've got plenty to spare.

This covers the 2 main aspects of proxy hosting, ram and bandwidth. A quality processor for example a Core2Duo, Xeon, Opterons are a huge plus but generally this is going to become an issue after ram and bandwidth.

What should you be trying to find in a web host when choosing one? Price isn't everything. If you want to make money you better be well prepared to spend some too. The $5 special on a shared server spells disaster in case you plan on being successful. If a host lets you host proxies in a shared environment this might sound great and cheap but you should wonder what else is running whenever they will be going to make it possible for you to work with a lot of resources of the server. Only an irresponsible web host would let one user eat all of the server resources, click home page and also you may not be the one using all those resources and then you will be very unhappy.

In case you are going with a dedicated or vps solution as suggested you probably want good support response times in case something goes wrong. According to your level of skill with servers, management could also be the best thing to have so you don't have keep your machine securely patched and running yourself. Uptime guarantees are also an excellent thing to have, a server that is not online is not making money.