What is a proxy?

A proxy sits between your client and the internet. You make a request to the proxy, the proxy makes the same request to the target server, and the response flows back through the proxy to you. From the target's perspective, the request originated from the proxy's IP, not yours.

Proxies show up everywhere in modern infrastructure: corporate egress proxies for compliance, CDN edge proxies for caching, reverse proxies like nginx in front of an app server, and forward proxies for scraping. Each pattern differs in where the proxy lives relative to client and server, but the core mechanic is the same.

For web scraping, proxies are how you avoid getting one IP banned. Datacenter proxies are cheap and fast but trivially identifiable; residential proxies route through real consumer ISP IPs and look indistinguishable from regular users; mobile proxies route through cellular carrier IPs and are even harder to block. Pricing tracks that hierarchy.