Chart of hosting plans

Official Start Date: February 15, 2012

Prizes

1st Prize
$29.99 Proxy Hosting Credit
60 ProxyNoid Advertising Credits
20 Bonus ProxyNoid Advertising Credits

2nd Prize
$12.99 Proxy Hosting Credit
60 ProxyNoid Advertising Credits
20 Bonus ProxyNoid Advertising Credits

3nd Prize
$6.99 Proxy Hosting Credit
20 ProxyNoid Advertising Credits
20 Bonus ProxyNoid Advertising Credits

4nd Prize
$2.99 Proxy Hosting Credit
10 ProxyNoid Advertising Credits
20 Bonus ProxyNoid Advertising Credits

Other Details

Hosting credit can be used for:

Proxy Hosting Packages of Any Size
Additional Monthly Transfer
Additional MySQL Databases
Additional Addon Domains

Hosting credit can not be used for:

Dedicated Servers
Domain Registrations
Domain Renewals
Domain Transfers
IP Addresses
SSL Certificates
Private Label DNS

How to enter:

1. Become a member at ProxyNoid if you are not one already.
   Follow ProxyNoid on Twitter and tweet this phrase: I love #proxynoid :D
2. Sign up as a member at NetBuilders webmaster forum if you’re not already a member.
3. Visit the contest thread at NetBuilders and reply with your Twitter username and your ProxyNoid username.

Prize:

1. Disk Pace: 5GB
2. Bandwidth: 100GB
3. Domains: 10
4. Control Panel: cPanel
5. 20 ProxyNoid credits

Some traffic to proxy sites serves no real purpose and wastes resources. However, weeding out harmful or useless traffic to your proxy can be difficult. This purpose of this entry is to outline different types of bad traffic and what the solutions are. There will be links to other entries with more specific information on each issue.

Out of Control Search Engine Crawlers

One problem with proxies is that PHP stores proxied pages which users view. This means the pages can be linked to later on. It also means search engine crawlers such as Googlebot or Bingbot might try to index these pages. Sometimes, thousands of proxied pages are stored, which can keep Google pretty busy. None of these pages are of any use in search results, so it’s better to inform the crawlers not to index them. The way to solve this in Glype is by adding an exclusion for browse.php to your robots.txt file. Unfortunately, this method is not compatible with PHProxy.

Hotlinkers

As mentioned above, people might try to hotlink your proxy. The strongest way to combat this is to set up server-side protection using your .htaccess file. This method involves copying and pasting some code and also comes with a caveat, but is well worth it if you take the time to set it up.

Bots and Scrapers

Automated bots might try to leech access from your proxy or use it for malicious purposes. There are three things which should be done to slow the typical onslaught of web junk. The first one is to rename browse.php in Glype as several bots specifically look for that file. The second thing to do is block known bad bots in your .htaccess file using a list which was compiled with the help of experienced webmasters. The third thing to do is enable CloudFlare on your account for free, provided your hosting company has it available. After it is enabled, a special domain redirect is required, which your host should be able to help you with. The redirect does not harm search engine rankings. CloudFlare filters known bot traffic before it even reaches your site by blocking it at the DNS level before the request is even sent to the web server. All of the data was compiled during stringent research under Project Honeypot, which is managed by the same company.

Known Spammers and Infected Computers

This is a major problem. Some people might attempt to connect to webmail services via your proxy and send spam. Others might be using your proxy to post comment spam on blogs or forums. This can reflect poorly on your site. Even worse, some computers are infected with hidden viruses which allow hackers to control them. You wouldn’t want the hacker using one of those computers to access your proxy. You don’t know what they might be up to. The best solution for this is to use a hosting provider who has implemented RBL (real-time blocklists) into their web server. This will prevent access for known problematic users.

Leechers

Some people over-use proxies and never click ads or purchase anything. These individuals are called leechers. You can find leechers and ban them by checking your web traffic statistics and finding out which IP addresses are making the highest number of pageviews or using the most bandwidth. In AWStats, they can be found by clicking ‘Full list’ under ‘Hosts’ from the left-side menu. It is recommended that you block anyone who has accumulated 10,000 or more hits or uses 100MB of bandwidth or more. When you find some addresses, the best way to ban them is by using cPanel if you have it. Log into cPanel and go to ‘IP Deny Manager’ under the ‘Security’ section. Copy and paste the addresses there.

There are also people who will attempt to download large files through your proxy. Glype and PHProxy both have settings to protect you from this. The setting in Glype is called max_filesize and the setting in PHPRoxy is called max_file_size.

Low-paying High-traffic Countries

Some countries certainly generate a lot of proxy traffic, especially those who’s governments impose internet censorship on citizens. As much as it is a good thing to help those people, some countries like China generate more traffic than servers can handle and don’t generate the same amount of AdSense revenue as traffic from other locations. Additionally, some countries like Nigeria have a particularly high rate of Internet fraud. The best option is to block China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Iran and Nigeria. There are two possible ways to accomplish this. You can either generate and use cut-and-paste code from blockacountry.com or use GeoIP to block countries if your hosting provider has it available. Both of these methods involve editing your .htaccess file.

Summary

It might take some time to implement all of the suggestions above, but they are worth it in the end because they substantially cut back on abuse and misuse. The simplest way accomplish everything is to host your proxies at x Proxy Host. Many of the features are built-in and don’t require any effort on your part. Those which are not will be implemented for you at no extra cost if you open a support ticket.

To set a 10MB limit, edit inclides/settings.php from your Glype installation and find this line…

$CONFIG['max_filesize'] = 0

and change it to this…

$CONFIG['max_filesize'] = 10485760

• Maximum file size limit for downloads of single files.
• Prevention from Google indexing proxied pages to cut back on duplicate content issues.
• Ad slot on proxied pages for webmasters to monetize their sites.
• Centralized configuration file.
• Blocking URLs.
• Blocking keywords.
• IP Bans.

Check out the official Suffix Proxy site and test the beta version or download the latest stable version.

View the forum discussion thread here for more details.

As a proxy list owner, one of your main needs is are constant submissions to your proxy list. Here is how you can earn both money and extra traffic by including your list in ProxyNoid’s network:

1. ProxyNoid’s network makes sure that you will receive a constant stream of checked and verified proxy submissions to your list.
2. They make sure that you don’t have to waste your time asking and looking around for new proxies.
3. The new fresh proxies ensure that your visitors will not find dead proxies. That means only quality sites will be submitted to your list which in turn creates more repeat visitors. This can lead to more possible clicks on your ads and increased revenue.
4. You earn ProxyNoid credits for each visitor that clicks on a proxy site on your list which was submitted by ProxyNoid.*
5. Your ads are placed on a special page in the network. You earn money from your own ads that will be placed on the special “connection” page. ProxyNoid will automatically convert each 5 points into 1 ProxyNoid credit which you can use to promote your own site. This means both money and traffic for you. You can choose which ads you want shown on the “connection” page from the advertising companies that are compatible with ProxyNoid’s. Only unique clicks count towards your points.

You will essentially have a wheel that constantly feeds your proxy list with fresh proxies. You earn money from the traffic that you send to the network through the ads on the “connection” page. The more traffic your proxy list sends the more points you receive which are converted into ProxyNoid credits. You can use the credits to promote your own proxy in the network whenever you want.

To try it, visit ProxyNoid, download the latest version and apply for a Proxy List Partners ID and API key. There is more information available within ProxyNoid user’s panel. If you already have an account, there, you can log in to read more about it. If not, simply create a free account at ProxyNoid.com.

Suffix proxy is sometimes mistaken as a phishing attack or as duplicate content because of the URLs it generates to establish the proxied connection via DNS wildcard. Google has on more than one occasion attempted to crawl the URLs generated by Glype’s browse.php. There are steps webmasters can take to prevent these things. It would also benefit Google and Facebook to have a better understanding as well.

EXAMPLE 1: Let’s say there is a suffix proxy script on example.com. Visiting www.facebook.com.example.com would bring you to the actual Facebook site. The problem with this is the Facebook security team mistaking it for a fraudulent copy of the Facebook homepage.

The solution for proxy webmasters is to restrict access to Facebook from a suffix proxy but allow access from Glype. Facebook does not seem to have an issue with people using Glype to access it.

EXAMPLE 2: Google mistakes suffix proxy pages as duplicate content. In rare cases, this can cause the original site to be removed from the results but have the suffix proxy version indexed instead. This hurts the original content creator because their site was removed from the search results and they lose traffic. The solution to this might be for suffix proxy webmasters to use robots.txt in some way to prevent indexing. It might also help if Google becomes more aware of this technology as it becomes more popular. Having an understand can also help them make any updates on their end which might be necessary.

EXAMPLE 3: Google’s crawler does not seem to understand Glype. Sometimes it attempts to index one proxied URL, then finds more proxied links from within and attempts to crawl them. This leads to Google attempting to index hundreds or thousands of proxied pages from one proxy. This increases strain on the server and causes spikes in resource usage. The high volume of requests to Glype in rapid succession can cause web server errors. Sometimes, Google attempts to retry proxied pages that generate HTTP error codes. This only adds to the problem. In some cases, it can cause the site to become unresponsive or crash completely. If Google had a different understanding of proxies, perhaps their crawler would be aware of when it identifies Glype. Ideally, it would not try to index proxied pages repeatedly. In all likelihood, proxied pages look like duplicate content to Googlebot. This is a side effect of the fact that a PHP script is being used to make a proxied connection to a website and returning the output as a URL.

Glype generates URLs that look somewhat like this:

http://www.example.com/browse.php?u=Oi8vd3d3Lm1zbmJjLm1zbi5jb20v&b=13

All links within the pages also have URLs that look similar. Googlebot will sometimes get hold of one of these URLs, then try to index every link it finds within. Sometimes it doesn’t stop for a long time. This can amount to a high number of requests to one site. This can tie up resources and sometimes causes connection limits to become maxed out, making a proxy hosting server unresponsive. The solution for Glype proxy webmasters is to disallow browse.php in your robots.txt file. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if Google came to a solution on their end if they’re not already working on it.

Add this line to the bottom of the .htaccess file in the Glype tmp directory.

deny from all

This will not only hide your logs better, but also conceals stored cookies, if cookies are enabled in your configuration.

Source: Protecting Glype Log files from unauthorised access | Glype themes

Blocking

Block all of the countries except the allowed ones, returning a 403 ‘Forbidden’ error to the user.

The following code will block a single country:

RewriteEngine On
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE XX AllowCountry
Deny from all
Allow from env=AllowCountry

Replace XX with the 2-character code of the country you want to block. You can find the ISO-3166 country code list here.

The example below would only allow America, Russia and China:

RewriteEngine On
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE US AllowCountry
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE RU AllowCountry
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE CN AllowCountry
Deny from all
Allow from env=AllowCountry

Redirecting

Redirect traffic from all countries except the allowed ones. In this case, you can specify a URL and users from non-allowed countries will be redirected to it.

The following example would allow access from America, Canada and France while redirecting users for other countries to www.example.com:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^(US|CA|FR)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com$1 [L]

It is possible to do this for as few or as many countries as you want. Each country code should be separated by a | symbol. If there is only one country, do not use the | symbol. The ISO-3166 list of country codes is here.

Suffix Proxy script is a different concept than Glype or PHPRoxy. First of all, it does not provide anonymity like the others. However, it does a great job of unblocking websites. Another advantage is that it does not require the use of a special address bar like other scripts. Instead, it uses the combination of a DNS wildcard, a web server wildcard and a short PHP script to re-write the URL. If the suffix proxy is installed on vectrosuffix.com and the site you want to visit is www.example.com, you would visit http://www.example.com.vectrosuffix.com using your web browser’s normal address bar.

Installing Suffix Proxy involves 3 steps:

1. Copy and paste the required lines of code to your .htaccess file, which should be in the same directory as the script. If this file already exists, download it via FTP and edit it, then upload it back to your site. If it does not already exist, simply create a file named .htaccess (include the . in front of it) and place the lines there.
2. Copy and paste the PHP code to a file named browse.php
3. FTP to your hosting account and upload the browse.php and .htaccess files.
4. Set up the DNS and Apache wildcard.

Instructions and Code

Place this in your .htaccess file and replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/browse.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt$
RewriteRule .* /browse.php [L]

Now, click here to get the PHP code, then copy and paste it to a text file. Rename it browse.php before editing it. Then, open it in an editor and replace yourdomain.com on line 3 with your actual domain name. Make sure to leave the leading . in place in front of the domain name. Upload browse.php and .htaccess if necessary to your hosting account.

The last step is the DNS wildcard. Don’t panic if you’re not sure what that means. The easiest way to do this is to use cPanel if your hosting account includes it. If not, you might have to contact your hosting provider to add the settings for you.

How to use cPanel to set up the wildcard:

1. Log into cPanel.
2. Click ‘Subdomains’ from the menu.
3. In the field that says ‘Subdomain :’, type an asterisks like this: *
4. Use the pull-down menu to select the domain where Suffix Proxy is installed.
5. When you click the ‘Document Root :’ field, the necessary info should automatically fill itself in. If it does not, contact your hosting provider.
6. Click the button that says ‘Create’.

Most hosting companies do not allow proxy scripts. If you need reliable proxy hosting, try x Proxy Host. You can even open a support ticket and ask to have Suffix Proxy installed for you and it will be done at no extra cost.