What’s most important, though, is that forward proxies work for the client. Proxy servers may also be used to protect clients from harmful traffic, monitor the activity of client machines, and cache page content for faster browsing. (Ironically, forward proxies can also help users bypass such restrictions, but that’s a topic for another time.) For example, a company or school may block certain websites with a forward proxy by intercepting outgoing requests from the network and filtering out requests to prohibited websites. One is anonymity: Since the forward proxy acts as your “face” while browsing the internet, any tracking software will have a harder time tracing your activity back to your masked IP address - it will only see that the request originated from your proxy server, not your client machine.įorward proxies can also impose browsing restrictions. There are several reasons why a client might want to use a proxy server. This way, the client never communicates directly with other servers - the forward proxy communicates on behalf of the client. A forward proxy sits in front of one or more client machines, and processes both outgoing requests to and incoming responses from an external network (like the internet).

The term “proxy server” usually refers to a type of proxy called a forward proxy. Proxies process client requests and optimize the network in some way, such as enhancing security, speed, or reliability.

In computer networking, a proxy server, or proxy for short, is a server located between a client and the server that hosts a website (we’ll call this the “origin” server). Requests and responses can encounter other servers between the client and server machines - these are called proxy servers. When you visit a website, your web browser (the client) makes a request to the website’s server, and the server returns a response containing all the files needed to display the web page in your browser. Put simply, the internet can be understood as a bunch of devices and programs, called clients, talking to other devices and programs that store websites, called servers. By the end of this post, you’ll know the fundamentals of how reverse proxies (and proxy servers in general) work, and whether implementing one is worth it for your business. That term might sound a bit cryptic now, but the concept of a reverse proxy and its uses is relatively straightforward if you understand the basics of the internet. In this post, we’re going to explore another common method leveraged by businesses to run safe, high-performing websites - it’s called a reverse proxy. There are a wealth of technologies to make the process of building and maintaining a website as hands-off as possible: content management systems to publish your site’s content, full-service hosting providers that give your site a home, and even website builders that can handle almost every aspect of your site.

Proxy vs reverse proxy