Definition of a Reverse Proxy Server
A proxy server forwards web browser traffic from your PC to the Internet. A reverse proxy server also forwards the same web browser traffic from the Internet to other internal company servers. In many cases, the web browser actually communicates with a reverse proxy server. For example, during an online purchase your web browser sends payment information that is then forwarded by the reverse proxy server to another computer that handles credit card payments.
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History
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During the early years of the Internet, website administrators recognized the need to prevent their servers from being accessible to web users without depriving them of those services. In the summer of 1996, the Apache HTTP project wrote an add-on module called mod_proxy in the Apache 1.1 web server that allowed it to act like a reverse proxy server. The Squid proxy server was released at around the same time with a reverse proxy server option. Today, updated versions of both Apache web server and Squid remain in wide use to run websites all over the world as reverse proxy servers.
Function
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A reverse proxy server takes in requests from web browsers all over the Internet. The proxy server forwards those requests to other servers. Those requests generate a response back to the reverse proxy server, which is then forwarded back to the web browser. For example, a request to get product information at an online store goes to an image server that stores pictures of the product as well as a database server, which stores the current price, inventory and description of the item.
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Security
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A reverse proxy server greatly improves a website's security because none of the company's servers are directly accessible to the Internet. As long as the website owner does not put critical applications such as email and payroll on the reverse proxy server, the company's other servers and applications are safe. For example, a hacker wants to substitute a product's image with porn and changes the price of the product to one cent. Neither the image server nor the product database server can be touched directly by users on the Internet. Because the reverse proxy server and website are not designed for users to update product images or prices, the hacker probably won't succeed in doing what he wants.
Advantages
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By segregating the different activities of an online website, website owners distribute the load between different servers such as database servers, applications servers and accounting servers so that no one computer does everything. Reverse proxy servers scale well as a website grows bigger without changing the original architecture. Many larger websites employ multiple proxy servers that point to different clusters of machines in order to distribute load further.
Expert Insight
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As Internet traffic volumes grows, website owners face slower website performance as servers behind the reverse proxy become bogged down with requests. To fix this problem, website owners use caching reverse proxy servers to save frequently accessed data locally. For example, users access the default homepage of a website frequently so a website administrator configures the caching reverse proxy server to store that page locally, thus avoiding requests to the application server whenever the default home page is displayed.
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