A reverse proxy sits between clients and origin servers, forwarding client requests to appropriate backends while presenting a single unified interface. Unlike forward proxies that act on behalf of clients, reverse proxies act on behalf of servers. Reverse proxies provide load balancing, SSL termination, caching, compression, and request routing. Popular implementations include Nginx, HAProxy, and cloud-native solutions like AWS ALB. URL shortening services are fundamentally reverse proxy applications—they accept requests for short URLs and proxy them to destination servers via HTTP redirects. The redirect service acts as an intelligent reverse proxy that transforms the request (changing the URL) rather than forwarding it transparently. This architecture enables the insertion of analytics, security checks, and access controls at the proxy layer.
Reverse Proxy
An intermediary server that receives client requests and forwards them to backend servers. Handles load balancing, SSL termination, and caching.
Jan 8, 2026 · About 1 min read
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Related Terms
Server-Side Redirect
A redirect handled by the web server before any page content is sent to the browser, using HTTP status codes like 301 or 302.
CDN
A network of geographically distributed servers that deliver web content from the location nearest to the user. Improves speed and reliability.
Edge Computing
A distributed computing model that executes processing at network endpoints geographically close to users, dramatically reducing redirect latency for short URLs.
Cache
A temporary storage mechanism that saves previously fetched data for faster subsequent access. Browser cache and DNS cache are common examples.
URL Rewrite
A server-side technique that internally maps a requested URL to a different resource without changing the URL displayed in the browser.
TTFB
The time from when a browser sends a request to when it receives the first byte of the response. A fundamental metric for server responsiveness.
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