Internet Proxy Servers

I’m a big fan of using internet proxy’s I use them for pretty much all my internet surfing my favorite one was hidemyass.com which has suddenly become very slow, which seems to be a big problem with proxy’s now everyone is realizing why we should be using them.
There are much easier ways of using proxy’s like using Tor, Privoxy or some other programs but you don’t really have much choice over the speed its running at so this is the main reason why I use internet proxy’s as I can just go to proxy.org and select which one I would like to use or even better open up the proxy.org widget in Opera, if you’re really paranoid you can chain all the internet proxy together as well (not sure if they would like that) but its another way to stay safe on the internet.

Now I have my own personal proxy for my use only and was thinking of making a public one, but after using my proxy for a while I couldn’t help but notice the bandwidth it uses which is just scary if I would run it on my own server I would use Squid but I’m not going to.
So does anyone use or own any proxy’s and what’s your opinion on them?