HTTP Proxy – Your Own HTTPS Proxy Server

If you ever tried to read certain websites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or YouTube at college or office, you will find that access to all of these social networking websites may be blocked. The reason being because your network director is blocking access to these sites using firewalls or web filtering software. Most social networking sites are considered to be a distraction and counter-productive, therefore most places choose to block them.

So how do you bypass these network limitations and visit banned websites in school or office?

There are two common types of proxy server that will give you access to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or YouTube. The first and most common is a web proxy. These proxy servers appear as simple websites and are the most predominant sort. There widespread availability is because they are very easy to setup. To employ a Internet proxy to access Facebook you just load up the web proxy page and then type in the Facebook URL address. No software or user login is necessary for web proxy sites. The second kind of proxy that you can use to access Facebook is that of a HTTP proxy. These are somewhat different than web proxies as they will require you to configure your web browser to access the proxy IP. Using the proxy IP you then are able to connect to Facebook. This second option is very easy to block by your system administrator, as you really should not be able to view the area of your browser needed to make it work.

Of the 2 the easiest and best solution is to use a web proxy. As I said a web proxy is just another website that acts as a jumping station to connect you to the sites you want to visit. To the web filters or firewalls, it would seem like you are visiting another website that has not been blocked.

To use a web proxy, simply visit a proxy site, enter the address of the site you wish to visit into the URL input form and hit enter. The proxy server will get the page and show the proxied contents as though you were visiting the site directly.

Using a web proxy is a very straightforward solution as there’s nothing to install. However there are some restrictions to what a proxy can do in terms of functionality on the proxied pages. Some websites like MySpace and Facebook need JavaScript to work properly. So when visiting there types sites through a web proxy, make sure to choose one which has good JavaScript support.

One work of warning a good system administrator may also be trying hard to trstrict your access to proxy websites. So it may be important to frequently hunt down new proxies that haven’t been blocked. If you need to find new proxies regularly, you can save the difficulty by subscribing to proxy mail lists that will e-mail new proxies to you on a daily or weekly basis. You can easily find web proxy listing sites by doing a search on Google.

I mentioned that there are two common proxy server options, but there’s a third more powerful option that very few folks know about. For less than 2 Euros a week you can subscribe to a private proxy program which runs from a USB stick without any necessity to install software or need admin rights. It uses US military grade encryption on your Internet activities so there is no chance of folks seeing what you are doing. This is a far more reliable method of accessing a proxy server, and thus the pages you would like, irrespective of where you are . You won’t have any issues with JavaScript if you use a private proxy service like this, so it is actually a good option, far better than a standard web proxy!