Reverse Proxy vs. Forward Proxy: The Differences

Types of forward proxies

There are many different types of forward proxies. The most common ones are classified by their origin. In this case, there are two types of proxies – residential proxies and datacenter proxies.

1. Residential proxies. These proxies have a real IP address provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) with a physical location.

2. Datacenter proxies. This proxy type isn’t affiliated with an ISP, as IP addresses come from secondary sources like data centers.

If you are interested in what different proxy types are, check out the video below:

What are forward proxies used for?

There are many reasons for single users or businesses to use forward proxy servers:

1. Accessing restricted geo-locations. Forward proxy servers could come in handy to access geo-restricted content. When users are browsing the internet, they usually see content according to their geo-location. When using a forward proxy, users can access a variety of content intended for other countries. For example, this is especially useful for companies that provide ad verification services. These companies can monitor ads regardless of their geo-location. For example, if you were looking to see if your ads are visible in Brazil, you would use a Brazil proxy, or Germany proxy to access content in Germany.

2. Ensuring anonymity. A forward proxy server acts as an additional safety layer that hides the web server’s real IP address by using one of its own. This is the reason why using forward proxy servers ensures higher levels of anonymity and security.

3. Web scraping. The most common usage of proxies is web scraping. Companies usually gather data to improve their marketing, pricing, and other business strategies. Web scraping helps companies to stay competitive in the market.

Forward proxies can also be used to control and monitor internet usage, create and manage social media accounts, and much more.

What is a reverse proxy?

As the name suggests, unlike a forward proxy that acts on behalf of clients, a reverse proxy server resides in front of backend servers and transfers client requests to these servers. Reverse proxies are generally employed to boost protection, speed, and reliableness. A reverse proxy gets the request from a client, passes it on to another server, and then forwards it back to the client, making it appear as if the initial proxy server processed it. These proxies make sure that users don’t reach the origin server directly, thus providing anonymity to this web server.

While being of no particular use to consumers and regular people, reverse proxy servers are the perfect fit for service providers and websites that have numerous visitors daily. These proxies can protect web servers, increase website performance, and help avoid overloading. Reverse proxies are also used for load balancing, caching, and SSL encryption.

Types of reverse proxies

In their functionality, all reverse proxies are more or less the same. However, we can distinguish two main types of reverse proxies based on their features. They are regular reverse proxies as such and load balancers. 

1. Regular reverse proxies. This proxy type intercepts the request from a client, directs it to the server to process it, and then sends it back to the client. This proxy type is mainly used for security purposes. 

2. Load balancers. This proxy is a reverse proxy subtype that leads to multiple backend instances instead of one. It is capable of distributing the traffic among multiple other servers and managing client-server communication between all of them. This type is more specifically tailored to distribute the load evenly among different servers, thus increasing the speed and performance.

What are reverse proxies used for?

Websites and service providers may use reverse proxies for different reasons, and here are some of them:

1. Load balancing. Frequently visited websites may sometimes need reverse proxy servers to deal with the flow of incoming traffic. Instead of handling it on its own, a popular site may distribute the traffic between multiple back-end servers and thus boost its capacity for handling many requests. If one of the servers is overloaded and out of order, the traffic can be redirected to other online servers keeping the web page running. The website engineers may even add more back-end servers to this load balancer to increase capacity and meet rising demand for performance.

2. Caching. A reverse proxy is capable of caching data that is commonly requested. Businesses that store a lot of pictures and videos may also speed up the performance of their websites by caching this content and reducing the load on the internet servers. 

3. Anonymity and security. Since reverse proxies intercept all the incoming requests,  they serve as an additional level of protection for backend servers. It helps prevent any malicious actors from abusing web servers by blocking suspicious traffic from specific IP addresses.

Forward proxy vs reverse proxy: the differences

The key difference between a forward proxy and a reverse proxy is that the first one is used by a client, e.g., a user inside a private network, while the second one is used by an internet server. A forward proxy can be positioned in the private network together with the user, or it can be online.