Reverse proxy (web server)
A reverse proxy is a web server that centralizes internal services and provides unified interfaces to the public. Requests from clients are forwarded to a server that can fulfill it before the reverse proxy returns the server's response to the client.
Additional benefits include:
- Increased security - Hide information about backend servers, blacklist IPs, limit number of connections per client
- Increased scalability and flexibility - Clients only see the reverse proxy's IP, allowing you to scale servers or change their configuration
- SSL termination - Decrypt incoming requests and encrypt server responses so backend servers do not have to perform these potentially expensive operations
- Removes the need to install X.509 certificates on each server
- Compression - Compress server responses
- Caching - Return the response for cached requests
- Static content - Serve static content directly
- HTML/CSS/JS
- Photos
- Videos