Actually, when the bandwidth was too expensive and connections were not that fast, people made proxies because they wanted to cut from the bandwidth usage. When you use a proxy, the pages you visited are stored in the proxy and the next time you visit the same page, you call the page from the proxy instead of calling it from its original location on the net. Until the proxy server is cleaned you keep getting the same page even if the page has been updated. So one person visits a page , proxy stores it and all other people call that page from the proxy which means they do not use bandwidth.
and yes it is used to cheat on location and hit quantities aswell.
BUT with the new technology you can see if an IP belongs to a proxy or not. So I believe it is not a big deal anymore.... A smart webmaster will find out that you use a proxy and will not hesitate to block your account
