Yes, we’re in the same boat. I pay for my proxy service now, just to make things easier and so I can save time, but I remember when I couldn’t afford this service and had to rely on free proxy sites to surf anonymously and unblock sites. The biggest problem is finding them however. I did search in Google for “free proxy site” and “free proxy list”, and here were my results.
Free Proxy Site
A search for a free proxy site looked promising – I was hoping to find some free web based proxies. At a quick glance, sites like “freeproxysite.com”, “bestproxysites.com” and “freeproxyserver.net” showed up. Great! My search was done.
This was far from the truth. Opening up these pages took me to a badly designed site with a bunch of advertisements, and names of proxy service. Ok, so I though maybe it was like a portal to other proxy sites, so I opened up a few free proxy sites that looked promising. Again, Google adverts, pop-ups to sign up for stuff, and another list of “free proxy sites” Ahhh. It was a portal to a portal. So I clicked again (after all, I was doing research), and you can guess that nothing useful came up.
Free Proxy List
It was a similar story with the free proxy list. The first two or three results had great site names – exactly what I was looking for. “freeproxysite.com” and “freeproxyserver.ca”. Free Proxy Server was actually a web based proxy, not a list of proxy IP’s like I wanted, and Free Proxy Site was just some rubbish advertisements and pop-ups. Free Nuts did show up in the first five results, which did provide some potentially good web based proxies, and I did get redirected to a Russian site with a REAL PROXY LIST. Some of the proxies from Free Nuts timed out, and about 5/10 were just different versions of the same site, but it was a start.
Conclusion
Its not that easy get these proxy lists and web based proxies that people use to bypass Internet filters. There are just too many other people trying to make money off of Google advertising and get your email address to send you spam or advertisements. Finding proxy sites that work was going to take a bit more of my time than I planned. The only good site that did come up, which is crucial, was Hide My Ass. In both searches, HMA shows up in result 5 to 10. They DO have a free list of proxy IPs as well as other free anonymous surfing tools like a free web based proxy.