checking US-only website status using curl - php

Question

[Problem]
There is a website which works for US-citizens only (shows info "A" for US-citizens, info "B" for non-US citizens). I need to constantly monitor this webpage for changes ("A" info) - an email should be sent when something is changed! How do I do it? The problem is that I live in Europe!
[Already accomplished]
I have a linux server, daemon and curl PHP script which accomplishes the following task! It works great for all "non-US-only" websites.
[Question]
One way to solve the problem might be to rent a US server but that's not acceptable at all and it is going to cost a lot! I believe that another way to solve the problem might be - to use a US VPN on my server, but for some reasons I won't do that. Is there a way to run curl through proxy maybe? Any ideas?
Current code is the following:
function getrequest($url_site/*,$post_data*/) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url_site);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, COOKIE_FILE); // Cookie management.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, COOKIE_FILE);
$result = curl_exec($ch); // run the whole process
curl_close($ch);
return $result;
}
and
$sleep_time = 1;
$login_wp_url = "http://www.mysite.com";
set_time_limit(60*10);
$result = getrequest($login_wp_url);
How do I grab contents from US-only website?
P.S. to get the idea of what I mean - try visiting the Hulu from Europe countries.
P.P.S. that's not a Hulu, not a homework.

Answer 1

Many cloud service providers, e.g. Heroku and Amazon, offer their smallest instances for free. You could simply set up one of these for free, make sure that you are provisioned on an US-located server and run your script there.
Another possibility would be to use a (free) proxy for these requests. Here is a list of free proxie servers: http://www.xroxy.com/proxy-country-US.htm.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "http://160.76.xxx.xxx:8080");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, 8080);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, "xxx:xxx");