Forward vs reverse proxy: what each one does

A forward proxy works for the people making requests: your software chooses it, and websites see the proxy’s address instead of yours. Every proxy you can buy by the GB or by the IP is a forward proxy. A reverse proxy works for a website: it sits in front of the site’s servers, receives every visitor’s request and passes it on to one of them, to spread the load, cache pages or block attacks. Visitors never choose it and usually cannot tell it is there. Nginx, HAProxy and the big content delivery networks are reverse proxies; you run or rent them for your own site, not to browse or scrape someone else’s.

Answer · The live comparison uses prices checked up to Oct 24, 2026; every figure in the text keeps the date it was checked.

The same middleman, facing opposite ways

Both sit between a visitor and a website and pass requests along. What differs is whom they serve, and so who sets them up.

The HTTP standard draws the same line. It calls a proxy “a message-forwarding agent that is chosen by the client”, and a reverse proxy a “gateway” that “acts as an origin server” while forwarding requests to “another server or servers” behind it (RFC 9110, section 3.7).

Which one you need

• You want requests to reach other people’s sites from addresses that are not yours: a forward proxy. That is what this site compares; what is a proxy server? covers the kinds and what each costs.
• You run a site and want it faster, steadier or harder to attack: a reverse proxy. Nothing on this site prices that; look at content delivery networks or put a server such as Nginx in front of your own.
• You want a script’s traffic to leave from your own server’s address: you can run a forward proxy yourself on a rented server, but it gives you that one address. Buying a proxy plan buys many addresses and a provider that keeps them working.

Where the two meet

A request through a bought proxy often meets a reverse proxy on the other side: many large sites sit behind a content delivery network that also runs their bot protection. That reverse proxy is what decides whether your forward proxy’s address gets the page or a challenge, which is why the kind of address you buy matters more than the proxy software. Residential vs datacenter proxies explains how sites treat each kind.