What is Proxy Server? and How do Proxy Servers work?

What is Proxy Server?

A Proxy Server is like a Gateway Between the Internet and your computer. If you are using a proxy server configured in your computer, the traffic from your computer will first go to the proxy server and then the respective destination. Similarly, if your response from the web browser will flow through the same proxy server. In this article, we will discuss What is Proxy Server? How do Proxy Servers work?

How Do Proxy Server Work?

Proxy Server Basic

Before understanding the Proxy server, let see how the normal web request is happening in your computer.

As shown in the image above, When you send any request from your computer browser, First It will go to your Server as your requested. Then, the server will send you the response back to the computer as simple as that. Say your computer’s IP address is 10.10.10.10 and you are connecting to the webserver which is addressed as 30.30.30.30 and requesting some content. Then, the Web server will know your IP and send your Requested package as a response directly to your computer.

Now let see how Proxy Server works.

When you configured the proxy server in your computer, all the requests to the webserver will not directly reach the webserver. But will reach the Proxy server first. Then the proxy server will send your request to a webserver on your behalf.

Say your computer is addressed as 10.10.10.10 and it is configured the proxy server address as 20.20.20.20. when you make a request, your request will pass to the proxy server and the proxy server will forward your request to the webserver which is addressed as 30.30.30.30. The Web server also will send the response to the Proxy server not to your computer directly as Webserver will know only your proxy address as the requester.

Need for a Proxy Server

Now we have understood the basic functionality of the Proxy Server. Now, let us see how to make use of this proxy server. Assume your computer is using your School, College, or Corporate Internet where they want to restrict users to request certain websites. It is difficult to monitor and restrict users from accessing certain websites from their own computers.

But If you configure the Proxy Server, you can block certain websites by their domain name or IP address from the Proxy server. Hence the connections are passing through the proxy server, it will filter the requests coming from the End-user to the Web server as shown in the image.

In the above image, you have configured the proxy server on your computer. In the Proxy server, we have configured the Domains like, facebook.com, Instagram.com, and twitter.com are blocked. So, when you try to access these websites, your request will first go to the Proxy server. Then, the proxy server will block these requests and through an error to User.

Likewise, let’s see some important reasons to use proxy server on your enterprise.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed What is proxy Server and How do Proxy Servers work. Along with it, we have discussed How to make use of a Proxy server. Along with this some reasons to use proxy servers on your enterprise. In our upcoming article, we will discuss how to Install configure The Proxy server. An then we will discuss How to set a proxy server in your computer to make use of it. Stay tuned and subscribe DigitalVarys for more articles and study materials on DevOps, Agile, DevSecOps, and App Development.