Reverse proxy deep dive
5 comments
·July 8, 2025shelajev
It took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize what the reverse proxy is. My brain got stuck on the fact that it is just proxying requests. What's so reverse about this? Silly.
happytoexplain
It's one of the classic cases of a thing being named relative to what came before it, rather than being named on its own merit. This makes sense to people working at the time the new thing is introduced, but is confusing to every other learner in the future.
rini17
Since web proxy was originally used near clients, caching stuff to save precious bandwidth of their kbps-tier connection.
azaras
Nowadays, "reverse" is suppressed in most ways. I have heard that Nginx is a proxy more often than a reverse proxy.
Caddy, Nginx, Traefik seem to be the most popular reverse proxies in the self hosting/homelab communities.
I definitely prefer Caddy in my experience, so far.