A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed in the neighborhood of one or more servers. Typically, reverse proxies are utilized in front of webservers. All connections coming from the Internet addressed to one of the webservers are routed through the proxy server, which may either entirely deal with the request itself, or pass the request wholly or partially to the main webserver.
There are several reasons for installing reverse proxy servers:
Security: the proxy server is an additional layer of defense and therefore protects the webservers further up the chain
Encryption / encryption is sometimes not done by the webserver itself, but by a reverse proxy that is equiped with SSL acceleration hardware.
s, the reverse proxy may need to have to rewrite the URL s in each webpage (translation from externally known URLs to the internal locations)
of this sort can often satisfy a considerable amount of website requests, greatly reducing the load on the central web server.
= See also =
proxy server
Squid cache is proxy server software that may be installed in a reverse proxy configuration
The Apache HTTP Server may be used as a reverse proxy.
