A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed in the neighborhood of one or more web servers. All traffic coming from the Internet and with a destination of one of the web servers goes through the proxy server. There are several reasons for installing reverse proxy servers:
* Security: the proxy server is an additional layer of defense and therefore protects the web servers further up the chain.
* Encryption / SSL acceleration: when secure web sites are created, the SSL encryption is often not done by the web server itself, but by a reverse proxy that is equipped with SSL acceleration hardware. See Secure Sockets Layer.
* Load balancing: the reverse proxy can distribute the load to several web servers, each web server serving its own application area. In such a case, the reverse proxy may need to rewrite the URLs in each web page (translation from externally known URLs to the internal locations).
* Serve/cache static content: A reverse proxy can offload the web servers by caching static content like pictures and other static graphical content.
* Compression: the proxy server can optimize and compress the content to speed up the load time.
* Spoon feeding: reduces resource usage caused by slow clients on the web servers by caching the content the web server sent and slowly "spoon feeds" it to the client. This especially benefits dynamically generated pages.
* Extranet Publishing: a reverse proxy server facing the Internet can be used to communicate to a firewalled server internal to an organisation, providing extranet access to some functions while keeping the servers behind the firewalls.
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