What is a pr0xy?
In case you’ve been living under a rock, pr0xies are services which forward websites to you.
What are the various types of pr0xies?
You will find a wide range of pr0xies, but the most notable types aren’t regarding their appearance, such as “1nterstell@r” or “ultr@v10let”, but their backend.
There are three categories:
| Type | Description | Pros | Cons | How to identify |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On-demand/Serverless | These services only keep the pr0xy running every time someone visits it. This does not include staying on the site. | Very abundant and usually free | Persistent connections (most commonly found in IO games) will be broken after 20-30 seconds | You can look for .onrender.com, .vercel.app, or .cyclic.sh. If the link doesn’t end with one of those, you should still check the domain (w/o the subdomain) for any “serverless” compute services. |
| Full/Self-host | These services are the real deal, but you’ll only find a few of them within every 100 pr0xies. They stay on 24/7, but doing so incurs compute costs and is generally paid-only. | Supports everything, including persistent connections | Most likely be shut down soon, e.g. the free trial ran out, or the site got too popular and ended up being too expensive for thee owner. | These don’t possess signs of being a serverless/on-demand pr0xy and don’t end with .repl.co. They might end with hop.sh, but those will expire and shut down after 30 days due to their pricing changes. |
| Replit | Replit has been subject to pr0xy abuse since the rise of COVID19, but they’ve started to crack down on them. | Free, and supports persistent websockets | Will not stay on for long, and has a high tendency to crash/overload the repl. | Repls end with .repl.co. Try to stay away from them; they never work. |
How do I identify an on-demand pr0xy?
- Given: https://c.pr.wip.la (demo pr0xy)
Find the DOMAIN (ONLY THE LAST TWO PARTS OF THE URL). It’s wip.la.
Go to https://wip.la, and find out what it is.
NOTE: THIS REQUIRES A BRAIN. IF YOU DON’T HAVE ONE, THEN GET HELP.
- The website talks about free website hosting (usually with references to “on-demand” or “serverless”)
Go to row 1 (on-demand/serverless pr0xies) - The website talks about free domains or some random stuff which has nothing to do with websites or running code
Go to row 2 (full pr0xies) - The website says “Run this repl to view the results here”
It’s a repl. don’t use it.