Chapter 9. Proxying

There are a few good reasons why you should not connect a busy web site straight to the Web:

  • To get better performance by caching popular pages and distributing other requests among a number of servers.

  • To improve security by giving the Bad Guys another stretch of defended ground to crawl over.

  • To give local users, protected by a firewall, access to the great Web outside, as discussed in Chapter 11.

The answer is to use a proxy server, which can be either Apache itself or a specialized product like Squid.

Get Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.