I run one, it basically lets you have one server that appears to host all your different websites, even if those websites are on different servers.
My search site, my lemmy site, my lotide site, and fbxl social are all hosted on different physical machines, but all of them are presented to the outside world using one webserver running the reverse proxy, and then the webserver reaches out to those different webservers inside my network and makes the content available to the outside world.
It's called a "reverse proxy" because with a normal proxy server you'd use one server called a proxy server to go out onto the internet and connect to all the different servers in the outside world, but with a reverse proxy the outside world uses one server to connect to all your servers inside your private network.
There are two reasons to run a reverse proxy.
The first is that if you only have one outside IP address, you can only host one webserver at ports 80 and 443, but if you want to host a lot of different websites then you need one webserver to recieve all the requests and dispatch them to where they need to go based on the hostname you're accessing the server using. (so for example, www.fbxl.net, social.fbxl.net, lotide.fbxl.net, and lemmy.fbxl.net all point to the same server, and that server redirects you based on who you're looking for)
The second is that it lets you have one server that's handling all the "outside world" stuff. Despite having all these servers, the only one that's directly connected to the outside world is the reverse proxy, and so you can focus on making sure that one is particularly hardened.
There are other forms of reverse proxy, but I'm focusing on webservers here since that's what I'm usually dealing with.
FBXLSJ0 / SJ Zero
npub10c…vej96
2023-09-21 08:58:06
in reply to nevent1q…5cpu
Author Public Key
npub10c2t6sa93hc207arvanz45dd750d6acsmfjc3eak5x8x35jnq8rqkvej96Published at
2023-09-21 08:58:06Event JSON
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"content": "I run one, it basically lets you have one server that appears to host all your different websites, even if those websites are on different servers.\n\nMy search site, my lemmy site, my lotide site, and fbxl social are all hosted on different physical machines, but all of them are presented to the outside world using one webserver running the reverse proxy, and then the webserver reaches out to those different webservers inside my network and makes the content available to the outside world.\n\nIt's called a \"reverse proxy\" because with a normal proxy server you'd use one server called a proxy server to go out onto the internet and connect to all the different servers in the outside world, but with a reverse proxy the outside world uses one server to connect to all your servers inside your private network.\n\nThere are two reasons to run a reverse proxy.\n\nThe first is that if you only have one outside IP address, you can only host one webserver at ports 80 and 443, but if you want to host a lot of different websites then you need one webserver to recieve all the requests and dispatch them to where they need to go based on the hostname you're accessing the server using. (so for example, www.fbxl.net, social.fbxl.net, lotide.fbxl.net, and lemmy.fbxl.net all point to the same server, and that server redirects you based on who you're looking for)\n\nThe second is that it lets you have one server that's handling all the \"outside world\" stuff. Despite having all these servers, the only one that's directly connected to the outside world is the reverse proxy, and so you can focus on making sure that one is particularly hardened.\n\nThere are other forms of reverse proxy, but I'm focusing on webservers here since that's what I'm usually dealing with.",
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