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I have read many explanations on reverse proxy I still don't understand the interest. Could someone really explains in plain english

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closed as off topic by Rory Alsop Jun 20 '12 at 7:12


The answer below is a reasonable description of a reverse proxy, but this question is still offtopic here. Please read the FAQ for guidance as to what is on topic. –  Rory Alsop Jun 20 '12 at 7:14
Why is it offtopic ? My question was of course interest of reverse proxy for SECURITY ! –  user310291 Jun 20 '12 at 19:37
What are you trying to ask? Why people use one? What does it offer? If so, it is pretty much a duplicate of this: security.stackexchange.com/q/9465/485 –  Rory Alsop Jun 20 '12 at 20:27

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

A reverse proxy is a proxy that retrieves data requested from a client from one or many servers. In many cases these are used for load balancing.

They might be also used when there are many web servers and a single PP address, the reverse proxy would receive the requests to port 80 and forward them to the servers that might be listening on different ports on the same machine (or port 80 on another machine) and then forward the response back to the user.

Also I've used a reverse proxy so I can use Apache's authentication / rewrite modules in front of another insecure standalone application that serves pages by itself.

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