Posted on August 03, 2009 by ProProxier

Since you are reading this post, I assume you are interested in “Proxy” in general. But what is proxy anyway? To me, the simplest answer is:

A proxy is an agent or bridge between two computers on Internet.

Those two computers might be your laptop and a web server such as one for facebook.com. The question is  why you need a proxy in the middle.  Can I directly visit Facebook from my laptop? Sure, you can, as long as your network provider allows it.

The chances are you might not have this luxury in many places. Try to access Facebook, Myspace, or YouTube from your school, office, or even the country you visit, you might see a bold message like: “Access to the requested website was prohibited!” or simply a broken page.

This is because your Internet providers set up a filter to block certain sites. They may have all kind of reasons to do so, but what if you really want to check your Facebook messages NOW? This is when proxy comes to the plate. Instead of calling Facebook directly, you just do 3 things below:

1. Visit a web proxy site (e.g. sslunblock.com or proxify.com)
2. Find a url bar inside that proxy, type facebook.com
3. Click Unblock or Proxify button

Wow! Facebook is unblocked!

What happened? Very simple, although facebook.com was on the black list, those web proxy sites were NOT. So you were allowed to visit them. After that,  you just asked the proxy to retrieve the content from Facebook. In this way, a proxy acts as your agent or bridge to the external sites.

But what if those proxy sites were blocked either? You just try another one. Considering hundreds of new proxy sites created everyday, you can always find a unblocked one from popular proxy listing sites such as proxy.org and tech-faq.com.

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