Whether you are at home, school, or work, it is possible to visit any website on the internet you want to without worrying for one minute about being blocked by filtering software. Many businesses and schools, and some home situations as well, block access to certain websites because they feel those accessing the internet would either be going to unapproved of sites or be wasting time doing non work related activities. While this may be true, there are ways around this as well. Other sites that are sometimes blocked are sites that use a lot of bandwidth like video sites such as YouTube or sites like MySpace.

The largest problem with blocking websites or internet uses is that sometimes there are legitimate reasons to use those censored web sites. Whether it is responding to an important message via Facebook or MySpace, or viewing a video that is actually work or study related, often there are real reasons to view sites that may be blocked. The solution to the problem is to use what is called a proxy site.

A proxy site is a website that allows an internet user to type in the URL of the site they want to go to and the proxy site will retrieve the data from that site. Using the internet this way and the owner of the website that is being visited will not know that you have been to that website, your IP address will not be involved in viewing the website’s info, and there will be little way of tracing who went to what sites. The proxy site “visits” the website for you and displays it on their site instead. This is a valuable tool for anyone that needs to bypass web filtering of any kind. While the internet service provider, the business, or the school will be able to tell that a proxy site was visited, they won’t be able to tell what sites were accessed through that proxy site.