A proxy server is a computer that makes requests on behalf of something else. That is the whole idea, and everything else is detail. The reason proxies confuse people is not that the concept is difficult. It is that one word has been stretched to cover several genuinely different technologies that happen to share that one behaviour. The software filtering web traffic on an office network, the service sitting in front of a busy website distributing traffic across servers, the thing someone buys to scrape product prices, and the layer terminating encryption at the edge of a content network are all called proxies. They do not do similar jobs. Most explanations of proxy servers make this worse rather than better. They list types without explaining what distinguishes them, they repeat the claim that a proxy encrypts your traffic (which is usually false), and they treat proxies and VPNs as near-synonyms (which they are not). By the end you know more words and no more mechanics. This guide takes the opposite approach. It explains what a proxy actually does at the level of the request, distinguishes the two fundamental directions a proxy can face, works through the types properly, is specific about what happens to encrypted traffic, and is honest about what proxies can and cannot protect. It also covers the parts that matter for a Canadian business in particular, including where a proxy sits relative to your data and what that means for the privacy commitments you may have made to your clients. The definition, and the request path A proxy server is an intermediary that receives a network request, forwards it to its destination on the requester's behalf, receives the response, and passes that response back. The two endpoints communicate through it rather than directly with each other. Walk through what happens without one first. You type an address into your browser. Your device resolves the hostname to an IP address, opens a connection to that address, sends an HTTP request, and receives a response. The web server sees your IP address, because your device is the thing talking to it. Now insert a proxy. Your browser is configured...
