Forward Proxy
A proxy is someone or something that has authority to do something for another person or thing.
A proxy server sits in the middle of a private network and the public internet. It is also called forward proxy. It regulates traffic by blocking harmful websites.
It also hides the identity of the clients by masking their IP addresses with its own while it fetches DNS and webservers on behalf of private network client’s.
Proxy server logs user activity and it keeps track of what websites users have visited and how long they are were on those websites.
Proxy can bypass restricted content. For example, a content or service blocked by a government can be bypassed using a proxy server.
Proxy server increases webpage loading speed for frequently visited websites as it caches copies in its database.
Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy regulates traffic coming into a private network. A reverse proxy sits between internet clients and servers hosted in a private network. IP address of reverse proxy is exposed to Internet clients while the IP address of the servers are masked resulting in reduced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Reverse proxy also acts as a load balancer as it can distribute clients requests evenly to multiple servers and overloading can be avoided.
