what is reverse proxy?
a server that sits in front of a website and answers on its behalf, the opposite direction from the proxy you buy.
the client believes it is talking to the site itself. the reverse proxy terminates tls, then routes to backends, caches responses, balances load and filters traffic. nginx, caddy and haproxy do this in front of single sites; cloudflare, fastly and akamai do it for millions. it matters to a proxy buyer for one reason: the reverse proxy in front of your target is the thing that inspects and blocks you. it sees your source address, your tls handshake, your header set and your request rate before any application code runs, and it decides there whether you get html, a challenge or nothing. most of what feels like blocking comes from rules at that layer: 403s, captcha interstitials, 429s, slow responses that never finish. you do not buy or configure a reverse proxy for scraping. you buy exits and client behaviour that its rules do not flag.