What is a Reverse Proxy Server and How Does It Function?

A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is located between the user and the target server. For the user, the reverse proxy server is equivalent to the target server. Users can directly access the reverse proxy server to obtain the resources of the target server without knowing the address of the target server or making any settings on the user side. Reverse proxy servers are usually used for Web acceleration, that is, as a front-end machine for Web servers to reduce the load on the network and server and improve access efficiency. Its main purpose is to improve network performance, scalability and security. Reverse proxies can also achieve load balancing, evenly distribute incoming traffic to prevent a single server from being overwhelmed, and hide the IP address of the real server to improve security.

What are the advantages of reverse proxy server?

The advantages of reverse proxy servers mainly include: ‌

1. Improved security

Reverse proxy servers can act as a network security barrier, hide the real IP addresses of internal servers, reduce the risk of direct attacks, and provide additional security layers, including firewalls, DDoS attack protection and other functions. ‌

2. Load balancing

Reverse proxy servers can distribute client requests to multiple servers, achieve load balancing, improve overall performance and reliability, and optimize resource utilization to ensure that each server can fully perform. ‌

3. Performance optimization

Reverse proxy servers can cache static content, reduce server burden, increase page loading speed, and thus improve user experience. ‌At the same time, it can also compress client requests to further reduce page loading time. ‌

4. SSL acceleration

Reverse proxy servers can be responsible for handling SSL/TLS encryption and decryption, reduce the workload of backend servers, and improve security and performance. ‌

In summary, reverse proxy servers play an important role in improving security, load balancing, and performance optimization.

How to configure a reverse proxy？

Configuring a reverse proxy server mainly involves setting the address of the proxy server, which can be achieved through proxy software such as Nginx. The specific commands are as follows:

• Use the proxy_pass instruction to set the address of the proxy server, and the syntax is:proxy_pass URL. Wherein, URL can be the proxy host name obtained through Swiftproxy or the form of IP and port number.

• If the URL in proxy_pass contains a URI, the access will be redirected to the address corresponding to the URI. For example: proxy_pass http://119.28.12.192:24039; will redirect the request to http://119.28.12.192:24039

• If you need to add reverse proxy settings to the Nginx configuration file, you need to find the Nginx configuration file, edit and add the corresponding proxy_pass instruction, and then save and reload the Nginx configuration.
  With the above instructions, you can configure a simple reverse proxy server.