Today I thought it's such a nice day, why not reflect on our history and tell the story of how proxycheck.io came to be as I often get asked how did I come up with the service and how did it start. Well it all started back in 2009 as a side project.

Now you're probably thinking, hold on a second proxycheck.io started in 2016 so how is the story starting in 2009! - Well back then I (the owner of proxycheck.io) was operating a chat room, similar to an IRC chat channel. And I hosted this room on a shared network with hundreds of other chat rooms.

And one day we started being attacked by automated bots that sent random gibberish into all our chat rooms. At first the attackers were using TOR (The Onion Router) to mask their IP Addresses and to get around all the banning we were doing. Then once we found a way to block TOR they started using SOCKS proxies.

So in 2009 I set out to solve this problem and I built a piece of software called Proxy Blocker. It even had a sweet logo:

That link above is to the original thread where I posted the first client software for Proxy Blocker way back in November 2009. At the time the client software would download a list of proxies from my web server each day and then when a user entered a chat room using one of those IP Addresses it would kick them out of the room and ban their IP Address for 24 hours.

Over time it gained a lot of complexity and popularity with the chat channels on the network. It gained features such as cross-channel ban sharing, automatically logging people in once verified as not proxies, redirecting users to different channels if they weren't proxies and many other features.

But the main change that occurred some time in 2010 was I switched it from downloading a list of Proxy IP Addresses from my server to querying the server directly for each IP encountered. Essentially I built the first version of proxycheck.io, an API that checked if an IP Address was operating as a proxy server or not.

Since that time until 2016 the proxy blocker API worked great and I used it for many other projects from protecting my forum and other websites to protecting game servers. I also gave the url for the API out to other developers to use in their own coding projects. But I always had this thought in the back of my head, what if I turned it into a proper service?

I actually nudged a friend of mine who had helped with Proxy Blocker a few times over the years to make such a service. I kept telling him it would be a great thing for developers and he could probably charge for queries to pay for servers and development. He humm'd and arre'd about it and the service was never made.

So after trying to convince him to do it I'd actually convinced myself that I should make it instead. Now to be clear this is 2016 now and there are various other proxy checking / blocking API's available, so I'm coming into it last but I've got a lot of experience as I'd already built Proxy Blocker over the previous 7 years. I had a great head start and I felt that with my unique perspective having protected many different kinds of services and hundreds of chat channels I still had a great product developers would want.

And that is where proxycheck.io was born. I bought the domain in 2016, started coding and within a few days I had the API up and answering queries. About 6 months later I started offering paid plans and a customer dashboard. So far things are going very well, the service is profitable which means all our bills are paid and my time spent coding the service is partially being paid back.

We like to think we're a little bit ahead of the competing services in this space because we're offering things like our cluster architecture, the whitelist, blacklist and query tagging for free to all customers. These are the kinds of features developers want but take time and knowledge to setup correctly. By having them situated at the API level it removes a lot of complexity for our customers and makes our service more attractive, especially to developers who want to get proxies blocked fast without spending a long time on the implementation.

We're loving the response to the service so far, it has been just over a year since we started proxycheck.io but we've gained a lot of customers and already handling millions of daily queries. If I had one regret it's that I didn't start the service earlier!

We hope this blog post was interesting, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us!