Proxy service to view US websites (not including Hulu! Really!)

January 16, 2012 12:18 PM

Recommendations for a free or not-free proxy service that will enable me to access US-only websites from the UK and/or France please.

This is for legal academic reasons (I need to watch videos of linguistic elicitations hosted on my university website for research purposes, but the subsite they're on is stupidly restricted to US domains, even when I'm logged in as a current student, and I'm currently in the UK). After skype arguing with the IT department, I gave up and decided to work around them. I've tried some free services such as Hotspot Shield but they seem to crap out under higher-bandwidth conditions. At this point I need to finish a project and would be very happy to shell out some money for a quality service but my initial research led me to some scammy looking sites, and I'd like to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff and feel comfortable giving one of these companies my credit card number, knowing that it will be secure and I will in fact get sufficient bandwidth to stream videos. Question is anonymous because this sounds sketchy even to me. Also because I've implied that the IT dept. is stupid. Which they are.

posted by anonymous to Technology (9 answers total)

I live in Japan and use a VPN service to make my internet life easier. I think that would do what you want to accomplish -- it makes the site think you're looking at it from the US. I use witopia and have been happy with them. I like it because it keeps me from being auto-forwarded to the co.jp domain, since I don't read/speak japanese well.

Youtube and various other streamed videos are fine while routing traffic through witopia. It's a little slower but not terribly, though I reckon YMMV. Getting everything set up at first was a little fiddly, but I managed it in one evening and it has been smooth sailing ever since.
posted by Arethusa at 12:30 PM on January 16, 2012

I am told that Tunnelbear is very good. I've only used it briefly myself but it was very easy to set up.
posted by corvine at 12:39 PM on January 16, 2012

if you can memail me i have a personal proxy running on a hosted server which is based in maclean virginia and will bypass geolocation. not posting it for obvious reasons.

if it works for you its simply an install of phpproxy (free software) installed on a few $ a month hosted plan.
posted by chasles at 12:40 PM on January 16, 2012

I'll second the WiTopia recommendation. The "Pro" service is $70/year and the speed is excellent. They have nodes across the US and around the world, and the service will also work with mobile devices, so you have VPN protection over unencrypted WIFI.

Also, if you're on a mac, I'd recommend Viscosity for VPN stuff. It has worked flawlessly for me, and WiTopia provides an easy, pre-configured installer.
posted by dickyvibe at 12:41 PM on January 16, 2012

I use vyprvpn from France - it's a bit pricey, but works fine for me. I've used it occasionally to stream (Hulu and Pandora), and it was ok, but I mostly use it for regular web browsing.
posted by motdiem2 at 12:49 PM on January 16, 2012

Not a proxy, but you might want to have a look at this
free method ...for a slightly different context ... but, perhaps, you it might work for you).
posted by aroberge at 1:38 PM on January 16, 2012

You could sign up for a small Linux VPS - $5 - $6 a month. There are a number of providers that run data centers in the US. Then use sshd as a SOCKS5 proxy for http/https.
posted by csmason at 7:52 AM on January 17, 2012

People I know use www.hide-my-ip.com, They have a free trial (3 days?) so you can give it a go.
posted by defcom1 at 12:07 PM on January 17, 2012

crap, sorry, it's http://www.easy-hide-ip.com/, work firewall blocked me from checking the other link. 3 Days free trial, Netflix and Hulu worked fine when I tried them.
posted by defcom1 at 5:03 PM on January 17, 2012