When proxy servers first hit the internet scene in the early 1990s, they had a relatively simple function: caching frequently accessed web pages to speed up load times.
Proxy servers still serve that function for some corporations today, but their use has expanded extensively into web scraping, market research and content filtering applications.
A proxy server essentially acts as a middleman between your device and the destination it’s trying to reach. Instead of going directly to a web page, for instance, your request is rerouted through a separate server with a different IP address, acting as a “proxy” for your request.
This is similar to a virtual private network, or VPN, which also sends your traffic through a separate server before reaching its destination. A proxy server doesn’t encrypt your traffic along the way.
But what it lacks in privacy, it makes up for in options:
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