Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Trustworthy Proxy Services?
gusoline writes "Since I'm now living in Brazil (originally from the U.S.), I'm looking for a reliable, trustworthy proxy service I can use to both access services I've used for a long time (Pandora, Netflix, etc.) and services I want to try out (Spotify). Since I'm not looking for illegal downloads or to hide what I'm doing, I'm less concerned about anonymity than I am about region restrictions, reliability, latency, and security of passwords and traffic through their network. I'm OK paying for services that deliver what I want (including the Proxy service itself). Any suggestions from the Slashdot crowd?"
That's what I was going to say. This can be had for as little as $20/month, and you can do anything you want with it.
Note however that the asshats at Hulu, Pandora, etc have been using a lot of dirty tricks to figure out of you're using a proxy. Currently Hulu does not work, even with a proxy. You will probably need to run a VPN. I think they're using some flash trickery to make a secondary verification that you're not using a proxy. It's a lot more than just the IP address of the originating request. There are a few HOWTO's out there that describe setting up proxies for Hulu that are a year or two old. They no longer work. (I've tried)
So, to sum up, simply buying a proxy service (from anyone) will likely not work with many services. You're better off with a VPS over which you can run a VPN. Of course, you need the technical ability to set that up...
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I'm biased because I'm the senior systems engineer at Anonymizer, but I recommend us.
Anonymizer Universal is an IPSEC/L2TP VPN, support for Windows, Mac OS X and iOS (we don't support Android, but it works. We don't supply instructions because Android is a moving target).
Total Net Shield is SSH tunneling+Apache proxy. Supports anything with an SSH client.
Take your pick. In either case we don't log traffic.
Traffic egress is from the U.S. and your IP address changes every day.
Full control of what's logged and what's going on, if you use less than 200GB you can get away with paying less than $20/month for their entry level VPS, you'll get your own IP address so it's very unlikely to get blacklisted (as that seems common with a lot of the more popular proxy/VPN providers). You'll need to setup everything yourself, but you get a lot more control, you essentially have your own server to play about with and it's not much more expensive than move VPN providers.
Before I setup my linode I was using overplay.net who were okay, but they were often quite slow and I did have issues with blacklisting on certain sites and every so often the server I was using would go down.
Go to http://www.lowendbox.com/ 20 dollars is a rip-off. For just a proxy you should be able to get away with bugger all RAM and storage. Transfer speed might be a bit slow though 10Mbps wont cut it for streaming.