The largest surviving directory of free web proxies lists 8,948 sites. On September 10, 2026, we looked up every one of them and opened every one that still answered. 8,831 of the names no longer exist in the domain system at all. Of the 98 that still resolve, not a single one served a working web proxy.
What we checked, and how
We captured all 761 pages of workingproxysites.com: its home page, both of its lists and all eight of its script categories. That gave 8,952 listings on 8,948 distinct addresses, each with the script it ran, the country the directory assigned it, how many clicks the directory counted and how long ago it was listed.
Then we ran two checks. Every name went through public DNS resolvers, which never touches the site itself. Every name that resolved got one plain request to its home page over https and again over http, from our own server in Germany, with no crawling and no forms submitted.
What is left
| state on September 10, 2026 | sites |
|---|---|
| the name no longer exists | 8,831 |
| resolves but points nowhere, or fails | 19 |
| a parking page | 37 |
| an unrelated site | 14 |
| a domain sale listing | 13 |
| no answer to our request | 15 |
| an empty page, a redirect or an error | 19 |
| a working web proxy | 0 |
The 15 that did not answer deserve a caveat rather than a headstone. The Internet Archive captured three of them in the last few weeks, which is the signature of a site that refuses requests from data centers rather than one that is switched off. We have not written those off, and no page of ours calls them dead.
A smaller surprise sits inside the survivors: five of these old proxy names now belong to companies selling paid proxies, including two country-specific sellers and a mobile proxy shop. The traffic that once went to a free web proxy is worth enough that somebody bought the address.
They did not die one at a time
8,107 of the 8,948 listings are thirteen years old. The directory took in 623 more the following year, then almost nothing: 49 in 2015, 42 in 2016, 92 in 2017, and single figures after that. The newest listing is five years old.
The addresses tell the rest of the story. 8,281 of the 8,948 sites, 92 percent of them, used a .tk domain, and 8,275 of those no longer resolve.
.tk names were free. They came from Freenom, which operated five country-code domains this way: .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf and .gq. Spamhaus, which tracks abuse across the domain system, wrote on April 24, 2023, that "as of early 2023, Freenom stopped new registrations in any of their free TLDs", after Meta sued the company in March 2023 over domains used in phishing against its users. The free names already registered stopped working over the following year.
Set a free proxy on a free domain and both halves have the same lifespan. When the address supply ended, the sites ended too, which is why an entire directory reads like a graveyard rather than a list.
One honest footnote: Freenom's own site was offering free .tk and .cf registrations again when we checked it on September 10, 2026. The names that were lost in the meantime are still lost.
Nobody wrote any of this down
Two more measurements say how thoroughly this whole layer of the web was forgotten.
We searched 23,797 blog posts from proxy companies, the corpus we keep for competitor research, for any mention of these 8,948 addresses. Exactly one matched, and it turned out to be the placeholder your-proxy.com inside a code sample. Not one of these sites is named anywhere in the industry's writing.
Google's Keyword Planner has no search demand for 8,887 of the 8,948 names. Sixty-one get ten searches a month or more, and five get a hundred or more. People look for a proxy site that works, and land on lists of names that stopped answering years ago.
What this means if you want a proxy site today
Any list of proxy site names, including the one this study is built on, is a list of things that used to work. The names cost nothing to publish and nothing to keep, so nobody checks them.
What is worth having is the check itself. Our free proxy list is re-verified every few minutes: entries that stop answering leave it, and every entry shows when it was last tested. If you already have an address from an old bookmark or a directory like this one, the proxy checker will tell you whether it still relays anything before you trust it with a page load.
The limits of free proxies have not changed. They are shared, so the sites that care about proxy traffic have usually seen them before you arrive, and they hold no session, so anything behind a login breaks part way through.
A few of the dead sites
Each one, read from its own record: what it called itself, what its page said, when the archive last saw it working and what its address does today.
- Ninja Cloak, which ran from 2007 and has redirected to another site since March 2016
- VTunnel, the proxy site half the school proxy lists once pointed at
- Xuxor, whose name was registered again in August 2026, five years after it stopped
- ProxySite.xyz, still answering, with a parking page
- Unblocked.us, first archived in 2004
- Chinaproxy.asia, a Glype install that lasted a summer
What this study cannot tell you
It measures one directory on one day from one vantage point. A site that blocks data center addresses looks the same from here as a site that is gone, which is why the fifteen silent ones are reported as silent rather than dead.
It also cannot say why any individual site stopped. The record shows a name that no longer resolves and an archive that runs out; it does not carry a reason, and we will not print one that the record does not support.
Finally, the directory covers only part of the web: it is the largest surviving list of its kind, and it stopped growing in 2014, so it describes the era of free web proxies rather than whatever exists today. We will re-run the same check by January 1, 2027.
Sources
- workingproxysites.com, all 761 pages captured September 10, 2026: 8,952 listings, 8,948 distinct addresses, with the script, country, click counter and age each listing prints.
- Our own DNS and homepage check of all 8,948 addresses, September 10, 2026, from a server in Germany. Raw results are in our own competitor table.
- Internet Archive capture index, used for the dead sites above and for the survivors, read September 10, 2026.
- Spamhaus, "Troubles in Tokelau, malfeasance in Mali: what's happening with Freenom?", April 24, 2023.
- Meta Platforms v. Freenom, filed in the Northern District of California, March 2023, the action Spamhaus cites as the trigger for the registration freeze.
- Freenom's own registration page, checked September 10, 2026, which again offers free .tk and .cf registrations.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner, worldwide monthly searches for all 8,948 names, read September 10, 2026.
- Our own corpus of 23,797 competitor blog posts, searched for mentions of every listed address, September 10, 2026.
