Acquiring a Server

If you are on a budget then pay a visit to LowEndBox.com which regularly features small virtual machine instances (e.g. 128Mb of RAM) for as little as £5 a year.

Otherwise a good choice is DigitalOcean who offer a small VM with 1Tb of transfer for only $5 (£3) a month.

DigitalOcean have a good tutorial on getting started with their service available here.

There is the possibility PacketFlagon will start offering shell accounts directly in the near future

Windows using Putty

Unfortunately it is difficult to download putty securely but putting that aside it can be downloaded from here.

Once installed load it up and add the IP address of your server into the hostname textbox of the Session screen.

Then on the left hand side expand the SSH section and select Tunnels.

In the Tunnels section set the Source port to be 9050 and the Destination to be Dynamic, click Add so D9050 appears in the textbox and then click Open.

You'll be informed that the authenticity of the host can't be established which is true because you don't know what the RSA key fingerprint is. You can choose to accept it and continue or be paranoid and bail. If you chose to continue you will be prompted for you password that was sent by email.

You can now configure your PAC file to use a local SOCKS5 proxy and your selected websites will route through your server!

Linux using OpenSSH

Assuming you are logged into your Linux computer load up a terminal.

Type the following; ssh -D 9050 root@xx.xx.xx.xx (Replace the IP address with your own)

You'll be informed that the authenticity of the host can't be established which is true because you don't know what the RSA key fingerprint is. You can choose to accept it and continue or be paranoid and bail. If you chose to continue you will be prompted for you password that was sent by email.

Load up another terminal (or a tab) and type the following;
curl --socks5-hostname 127.0.0.1:9050 http://wtfismyip.com/json

You should see the following output indicating that your ISP is Digital Ocean.

You can now configure your PAC file to use a local SOCKS5 proxy and your selected websites will route through your server!