Earnings For School Proxy And Anonymous Web Proxies In December?

All online proxy webmasters that are primarily targeting school students can expect an 80% fall in revenue and traffic levels in December until school reopens the next year, around Jan 6th. You would really wish there are no holidays available for students since they do not need to use any web proxy servers for unblocking websites they want to visit. How do you know if you are unwittingly serving these college students? Very simple, just check your proxy logs. If most of the destinations are MySpace, Bebo and Facebook etc, welcome to join the black Christmas club.
You people really have to thank the remaining 20% support from the office workers that still need to proxy websites overcome web blocking or internet filters as well as the all time proxy users that are interested in internet anonymity and hiding their IP addresses for continued support throughout these bad times. If most of your proxy web sites traffic are from the US, Canada and Europe, do not be surprised when you get $0 for the few days around Christmas. By the way, if your proxy hosting provider allows you to easily downgrade to a cheaper, low bandwidth plan during low traffic periods, this is the time to do so. As long as this proxy hosting plan change does not involve you doing anything such as moving files from one server to another, go for it since your free web proxy sites will be getting very low usage.

During this proxy lull period, some public proxy owners actually wish for parents to install parental control software and internet filters such as NetNanny on the home computers in order to block MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and other social sites that their children often surf online. That would certainly bring back the proxified surfing habits they are so used to during school days. This is really such an irony, on one hand the web content filtering companies are trying their best to add internet proxy websites to their blacklist such that they cannot be used by the school bypass filters students. Proxy webmasters often curse and swear when their new free proxy server is being blocked by web filters leading to zero traffic and web revenues. On the other hand, if there are no content filters around, there is no need for students to use web proxies in the first place!

If running proxies are your only source of internet income, especially for beginners web proxymasters, it is such dark periods that make you take a hard look at how to improve your proxy business. You may need to start customizing and promoting your proxy new services to the office workers and fans of anonymous web browsing. To retain office workers, you need to try harder at preventing your proxy from being detected and automatically blocked by websense filters. These group of proxy visitors are more likely to remember and directly type in your proxy url if it is short enough, catchy and easy to recall. If you can provide a long running proxy unblocker that is reasonably fast and remains unblocked for a long time, you will gain that office visitor as well as his or her close colleagues as loyal recurring proxy users. Basically, you want to depend less and less on third party free proxy lists for incoming traffic.

One way to do so is the use of adding SSL certificates to your web proxy server. SSL is the short form for Secure Sockets Layer, a well tested and trusted internet security communications protocol that uses a 128-bit secret key. If you have used anyway web addresses starting with https://, usually with online banking and shopping websites, you have experienced the functions of SSL certificates. Specifically, they enable sensitive information such as bank account numbers and social security numbers to be encrypted and securely transmitted over the internet. Each SSL certificate uniquely identifies the owning website’s identity and this information is also authenticated by a trusted Certificate Authority that issued the certificate. Are you wonder what has all these encryption and trust got to do with defying detection from web filters? This has do to with how internet filtering companies such as Websense perform labeling of all the gazillion number of websites available online these days. They use automated software scripts known as web crawlers and bots to download and sample webpages from websites and use some fuzzy classification algorithms to gauge whether the sample website is safe, unsafe or a proxy etc. These bots are known to not work correctly with web addresses starting with https:// and they are unable to read the encrypted web contents. It is much easier to teach office workers how to unblock websites using your new https:// proxy url.

Talk to your proxy hosting providers on the issue of SSL certificates. You will need their help to add it; it is not as simple as FTP uploading the SSL certificate onto your proxy hosting account. They can also advice on where and what types of SSL certificates to buy and use. For example, there are many trusted and not so trusted issuers of SSL Certificates online. Because there are many different types of web browsers nowadays, they are programmed to behave differently to SSL certificates issued by different internet Certificate Authorities. The biggest, most well known and also the most expensive SSL certificates are from VeriSign. Next you have the cheaper ones from Thawte, Geotrust and Comodo. Finally, you can even have a self-signed ssl cetificate that costs next to nothing and as you may have expected, trusted by nobody and no web browsers as well. Some web browsers try very hard to warn the users when they encounter a self signed or a SSL certificate signed by a not so trusted certificate authority, they often pop up a warning saying something like “Do you want to display the nonsecure items?”. Nearly 50% of people will click NO and they will never see your proxy website in this case.

By the way, for proxy owners there is no need to go all the way out and get those 256-bit extended validation SSL certificates. The point here is to simply get to use the https:// prefix for your proxy url and not to aim for the highest level of encryption available. These extended validation SSL certificates are more expensive, and require more encryption processing so your proxy server can be overloaded and slowed down, reducing the proxy users experiences. By the way, it should be pretty clear that getting a SSL certificate for MyBigAndObviousMyspaceAndFacebookProxy dot com is not going to help at all. Similarly, trying to unblock an existing proxy server is not worth the effort. Just buy a new domain name that does not sound so proxy like and get a SSL certificate for it to combat filter detection. Something like EmailMyHomeworkOnline dot com should cut it for stealthy proxy web sites.