Surely you have read the words proxy or proxies more than once during you Internet usage. But what is it? What is it useful for?

A proxy is a program or device that performs an action in representation of another one. To say it more clearly, a proxy is an intermediate between your computer and another one. For instance, if we want to visit a website, we can do it through a proxy. What the proxy does is asking for it to receive the website information (images, texts, multimedia content, etc.) and we will then receive it from the proxy, which shows it to us on our browser.  It is just functions as an intermediate between our computer and another one with Internet connection. Depending on the proxy we use, it will give us more or less privacy protection.

What is a proxy useful for? There are different kind of proxies, so let´s take an overview on them and their usage.

A web proxy allows us to access a website guaranteeing us the anonymity of  our computer during our visit to that site. The visited website will not know which IP has actually visited it, nor will it obtain any data from our computer, instead of that, it will only know those of the proxy we are using. With such proxies we can do several things: modifying the data that the proxy provides to the web, enlighten the loading process of the website, access websites that are only available for IP´s of certain countries, etc..

A FTP proxy works quite similarly to a web proxy, only that instead of entering a website, it accesses a FTP. In most cases, when we connect to a FTP we intend to download large files, and since it is difficult to find a quick FTP proxy, it can take quite a lot of time to complete the process.

Cache proxies are another common kind, probably the more used ones.  It´s main purpose is to pre-load the content of a website.  This way, next time we visit that same site, we will have it loaded much faster.

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