The WordPress developer community keeps making awesome plugins and giving them away for free. Recently, I came upon one nifty plugin which allows you to set up your WordPress installation as a proxy website.
What is a proxy site?
The word “proxy” can be defined as an act of substituting for another person or thing. In the Internet, people set up proxy site to be used as a substitute for accessing another website. These sites are often used by users who are blocked from accessing certain websites, such as social networking services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), video/file-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, MegaUpload) or adult entertainment sites.
Using the WordPress proxy site plugin
I personally tried the RePress plugin which can be found in the WordPress plugin repository. The setup works just as it would with any typical WP plugin you want to install. You’ll only want to make sure that you set your WP permalinks to use any setting other than the default, and add all the blocked website URLs you want to visit into the plugin’s whitelist setting.
Once those are set, you can access the blocked site as per the following example: http://yourwpsite.com/proxy/youtube.com
Words of caution
Proxy websites are popular amongst those looking for a fast buck using the Internet without the hassle of maintenance. Unfortunately, due to the heavy load it puts on your server in terms of bandwidth and disk space usage, this money-making method is only suitable for those who own dedicated servers. If you plan to set a proxy site on your shared hosting, be prepared to have your account shut down.
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Obviously working…