Hey! Sorry for the repeating question, I have a very specific question though.
For context, I access my services using a vpn, and that’s been great. However, I’ve been a lot of people mentioning reverse proxies. Are they necessary or more of a convenience thing? I ask because I don’t see something that I cannot do with my current vpn setup.
Thanks!
No, a reverse proxy is for a web service provider to use, usually for wiring up different backends for different routes, having one place to do rate limiting and tls termination etc. A forward-proxy (or just “proxy) functions in a way that is similar to a vpn, but you don’t need both and a vpn is more thorough in the types of traffic it supports and the security of encryption it provides.
A reverse proxy will let you write domain name -> IP. People use them even in private networks to remove the need to remember a bunch of IPS. They can be used in conjunction with exposed services but exposing them you would do somewhere else (port forwarding in your router)
If you use your services for yourself or family, you don’t need a reversed proxy, but to share some of your services to the public or your friends, you need a reversed proxy in order to let them use/remember your domain name without knowing your public ip given by your isp; for convenience and security reason.