Ask yourself this before you invest in dedicated proxies

I'm sure you can all relate to this sentiment:
Proxies are a pain in the ass.

Am I right?
If any of you are anything like me, you've spent wasted a bunch of time trying to find free proxy alternatives. You might use Tor or a CGI/PHP Proxy for web browsing. You probably scour the internet for public proxy lists and then scour the net again to find programs to test those proxies for connectivity and anonymity....

I've spent so much time and energy on finding free proxy alternatives that I figured I might as well list a few here for you all to benefit from. My hope is that I can at least save you all a little time and money. Here goes:

Palary:
When doing referrer spamming, you dont have to use much bandwidth or make multiple requests for each target. All you really need to do for each target is make one call through a proxy using a fake referrer.

For referrer spamming, TOR will suffice. Its free and stable and anonymous, but not super fast. It can be a bit tricky for newbies to figure out how to install TOR, and many of you might not have dedicated or VPS hosting on which to use TOR.

So if TOR isn't an option for you, I suggest you try this:

https://palary.com/main/load_page?sfrurl=http://www.targetsite.com&sfrReferer=http://www.fakereferer.com

Using the palary browser, you can send a fake referer request! Can you believe it? This works just as well as using TOR or any other proxy and it doesnt require any setup, installation or any of your server resources!  

Beyond using it for referrer spamming, Palary is a fairly good all-round solution for anonymous browsing, so check it out.

Translation:

This one is pretty obvious. Online website translation tools make for pretty decent proxies. I wouldnt depend on them for high-anonymity, but they can do the trick for quick and dirty tasks. Here are some examples:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=ko_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.TARGETWEBSITE.com 

Also, check out these website translators:

http://www.worldlingo.com/
http://www.transparent.com/
http://www.tranexp.com/
And of course, Google.

Externals:

By externals, I am referring to websites that allow you to open up external websites from the current sites. They aren't at all a sure thing, so be sure to test them first by going to whatsmyip or some other IP checker website. Here's an example:

http://www.netvibes.com/proxy/xmlProxy.php?url=www.TARGETWEBSITE.com

So there you have it. Those are just a few examples of the kind of things you can look into before you decide to go spend a bunch of money on proxies.

To tell the truth, you really cant beat having your own dedicated & private IP based proxies, but until you can justify spending some money on them, make sure you look at all the free alternatives available to you. 

UPDATE: I removed a bunch of exmaples that didn't work properly. This is what happens when you write posts without paying proper attention.