Xroxy.com is gone. It published free open proxy lists from April 2005 until January 2023, one of the longest runs any free list has had. By December 2023 the domain served an unrelated news site. The name was registered again in June 2025 by a new holder. Since August 2025 it shows a domain-for-sale page. About 720 people a month still type its name into Google (Keyword Planner, September 2026), and they land on that page. This is what the archive record says the site was, when it stopped, and what to use now.
Everything below comes from three records: the Internet Archive's captures of the site, the .com registry, and requests we made ourselves on 6 September 2026. Where the record is silent, this page says so.
What Xroxy.com was
The first archived capture is dated 27 April 2005. The page called itself "Xroxy.Com - Fresh HTTP Proxy Lists". It described a free open proxy list in a table you could filter by proxy type, country of origin and connection latency, sorted by latency or reliability. Anyone who wanted the whole list could "get the full list via email". That was a serious offer in 2005, when most lists were a pasted block of text.
By 22 June 2010 the title had changed to "XROXY.COM - more than just proxy", and the page tells you why. It showed 1,532 proxies available, updated that morning. It claimed that its "back-end software rechecks all the proxies in the database several times a day. So you'll find here live proxies only." Around the list sat a forum called Xorum, where users posted their own lists. There was a directory of web proxies and a page each for UK and US proxies. And there was a premium offer: "Your premium HTTP(s) proxy in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, EU and Asian countries is one click away! Free 3-day trial is included!" The free list was the front door. The paid proxies were the business.
The list kept growing. The capture of 30 May 2015 shows 1,826 proxies available, and the capture of 5 June 2020 shows 3,098. The 2015 forum still carried real posts, such as "123 Scrapebox-Passed HTTP Proxies - Freshly Verified". By June 2020 the newest forum posts were spam for a gambling site and for sneakers. The list itself still updated daily.
| Capture | Page title | Proxies listed | What the site ran |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27 April 2005 | Xroxy.Com - Fresh HTTP Proxy Lists | not stated | filterable free list, full list by email |
| 22 June 2010 | XROXY.COM - more than just proxy | 1,532 | list, Xorum forum, web proxy directory, premium proxies with a 3-day trial |
| 30 May 2015 | XROXY.COM - more than just proxy | 1,826 | same, forum active |
| 5 June 2020 | XROXY.COM - more than just proxy | 3,098 | same, forum overrun by spam |
| 19 January 2023 | XROXY.COM - more than just proxy | not stated | last capture of the list; premium link points to an affiliate |
| 20 December 2023 | China Sentry | none | an unrelated defence-news site on the domain |
| 3 August 2025 | Domain for Sale - xroxy.com | none | a parking page, still live on 6 September 2026 |
Source for every row: the Internet Archive capture of that date, read on 6 September 2026.
When it died, from the archive record
The Internet Archive holds 226 monthly captures of xroxy.com, from 27 April 2005 to 28 June 2026. That is a capture in most months of 22 calendar years, which is how a site with real traffic gets archived. The chart shows the months captured per year.
The end is bracketed by two captures. On 19 January 2023 the page is still the proxy list. Its premium menu item points at an affiliate link rather than the site's own product. The next capture, on 23 February 2023, is a redirect to www.xroxy.com. So are the captures of May, July and August 2023. The captures of the www address in March, June and September 2023 failed. On 20 December 2023 the domain served a page titled "China Sentry", a site publishing weekly summaries of United States defence activity in the Indo-Pacific. It still served that site in March 2025.
The registry closes the story. The record we read on 6 September 2026 shows the current registration dated 15 June 2025, through GoDaddy, expiring 15 June 2027. A domain first archived in 2005 with a registration date in 2025 has been dropped and registered again. The capture of 3 August 2025 shows the result: "Domain for Sale - xroxy.com | Brandable & Ready to Use". The live site showed the same page on 6 September 2026.
So the list stopped in the first weeks of 2023. The domain has changed hands at least twice since. Nothing that is on it today has anything to do with proxies.
What the record does not say
No capture carries a closing note. The site did not announce that it was shutting down, and the archive has no page that explains it. The registrant before June 2025 is not in the record we hold, so we cannot say who let the name go. The proxy counts above come from one capture per year, not from a daily series. The site's claim of "live proxies only" is its own claim, which we never measured. What the captures do show is a forum that had lost its users to spam by 2020, and a premium link that had become an affiliate link by 2023. A list that funds itself through a paid product loses its reason to exist when that product goes.
The sites Xroxy recommended, today
The 2020 capture carried a box called "Proxy websites" that sent readers to other lists. We checked each one on 6 September 2026 with a single request from our server and a DNS lookup.
| Site recommended in June 2020 | State on 6 September 2026 | Archived |
|---|---|---|
| ProxyLists.Net | answers | 2004 to 2026 |
| Proxz lists | dead, no DNS record | 2004 to January 2025 |
| Free Proxy Lists (freeproxylists.net) | answers 403 to anything that is not a browser | 2011 to January 2023 |
| Proxy-listen.de | redirects to https, which does not answer | 2007 to February 2023 |
| Checked Proxy Lists (checkerproxy.net) | answers | 2011 to 2026 |
| My-Proxy | answers | 2005 to 2026 |
Three of six still answer. The pattern across the free-list world is the same. In our survey of 69 free proxy sites on the same day, 22 were dead, parked, absorbed or for sale.
What to use instead
The honest replacement for a free proxy list is a free proxy list that proves its entries answer. On 6 September 2026 we fetched every free list that was still alive and took up to 200 entries from each. Each entry had to relay a real request and come back with an exit address that was not ours.
| List | Entries tested | Relayed a request |
|---|---|---|
| free-proxy-list.net | 200 | 86 |
| monosans proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 62 |
| iplocate free-proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 51 |
| proxifly free-proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 36 |
| geonode free list | 200 | 15 |
| hide.mn list | 64 | 0 |
No list relayed more than half of what it published, and the best one relayed 43 percent. That is the base rate of free proxies, not a fault of any one site. It is also the reason Xroxy re-checked its database several times a day in 2010. Whatever list you pick, check an entry before you use it.
Our own free proxy list was part of the same test, and the same hour showed us something we had to fix. Our verifier had been accepting decoy servers that answer every request and forward nothing, and they made up most of our live HTTP set. Since that day a proxy is marked alive only when our own test request came back through it, carrying a code we sent, on every protocol. The list is re-verifying under that rule as you read this. The proxy checker applies the same test to any list you paste in.
Free lists have a ceiling that no amount of checking removes. Every address on them is public, shared with everyone who found the same list, and already known to the sites people most want to reach. When a job needs an exit that stays up, keeps a session and has not been handed around, that is a paid proxy, billed by the gigabyte. The free list stays the place to test first.
Sources
- Internet Archive captures of xroxy.com dated 27 April 2005, 22 June 2010, 30 May 2015, 5 June 2020, 19 January 2023, 20 December 2023, 3 August 2025 and 22 January 2026, read on 6 September 2026.
- Internet Archive CDX index for xroxy.com, one row per captured month, read on 6 September 2026.
- The .com registry record for xroxy.com via rdap.org, read on 6 September 2026.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner, monthly searches for "xroxy", September 2026.
- HProxy measurements on 6 September 2026: one request to xroxy.com and to each of the six sites it recommended, and the same-hour relay test of alive free lists.
