Use of reverse proxies

When accessing different websites, proxy servers and HTTP pipelines play a key role. The agent can be the user's local computer, or it can be located anywhere between the user's computer and the terminal server. Reverse proxy is a widely used proxy type. Websites and service providers use reverse proxies for different reasons, and here are some of the main uses of reverse proxies:

1. Cache

By caching commonly used request data, reverse proxies can significantly speed up website access, reduce the load on Internet servers, and bring users a faster and smoother browsing experience.

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Caching is an extremely effective solution for businesses that store a lot of static resources such as pictures and videos. These static resources usually do not change frequently and take up a lot of bandwidth and server resources. When users access these static resources, the reverse proxy caches them on the proxy server. The next time the user requests the same resource again, the proxy server can directly return the cached resource to the user, without the need to request the back-end server, thus greatly reducing the access pressure on the back-end server.

By caching static resources, reverse proxies can also enable faster content delivery. Transferring resources such as large numbers of pictures and videos usually takes a long time, especially when the network is poor. The caching mechanism of the reverse proxy can store these resources geographically closer to the user, for example, on an edge node or a CDN (content delivery network). In this way, users can obtain these resources from faster edge nodes or CDNS when they request them, which greatly reduces content transfer time and improves the loading speed of websites.

2. Anonymity and security

First, reverse proxies increase the anonymity of the server by intercepting all incoming requests, hiding the real IP address of the back-end server. In the case of a traditional direct connection, the real IP address of the back-end server is directly exposed to the visitor. However, through the reverse proxy, visitors can only see the IP address of the proxy server, but cannot directly obtain the real IP address of the back-end server. In this way, the location and identity of the back-end server can be effectively hidden, reducing the risk of the server being located and attacked.

①Advantages of using a residential agent

Second, reverse proxies can help prevent any malicious actors from abusing the Web server by blocking suspicious traffic coming from a specific IP address. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) is a common attack mode among network security threats. By coordinating a large number of malicious requests, an attacker sends a large amount of traffic to the target server. As a result, the server is overloaded and cannot respond to requests from legitimate users. The reverse proxy can detect an abnormally large number of requests from a specific IP address, filter and block them, and effectively mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks on servers.

In addition to preventing DDoS attacks, reverse proxies can perform other types of security detection and filtering. For example, it can detect and block threats such as malware, viruses, trojans, prevent malicious web crawlers and crawler attacks, and protect the sensitive information and user data of the website.

3. Load balancing

Popular websites often require reverse proxy servers to handle large amounts of incoming traffic. By using a reverse proxy server for load balancing, incoming requests can be evenly distributed across multiple back-end servers. This way, each back-end server only needs to handle a portion of the requests assigned to it, increasing the site's ability to handle a large number of requests. When one of the servers is overloaded or fails, the reverse proxy can redirect traffic to other back-end servers that are online, keeping the site running continuously. Site engineers can also add more back-end servers to the load balancer at any time to increase capacity and meet growing performance demands. This dynamic load balancing mechanism allows the website to flexibly respond to different sizes of traffic, maintaining high availability and stability.

②Determinants of proxy pool size

To sum up, reverse proxies have a wide range of uses in the modern network environment. It provides high performance, high availability and high security for the website by caching common data, providing anonymity and security, load balancing and other functions. Through the proper configuration and use of reverse proxies, websites and service providers can better meet the needs of users, improve the user experience, and protect the stable operation of servers and websites.

Use of reverse proxies

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