Technically forward proxies and reverse proxies are almost exact opposites of each other, but that's where the comparison ends.

For all practical purposes, anyone dealing with forwarding proxies or needing forward proxies in their business need not worry about or even know about reverse proxies.

Let me explain:

Forward proxies function as a proxy for you, the end-user when you are browsing without showing your IP or web scraping without revealing your IP.

Reverse proxies function as a proxy for the servers themselves when the reverse proxy is representing a bunch of servers behind it.

It can be used in load balancing, caching requests, so the serving time is faster, etc.

In fact, behind the scenes, we at Proxies API are a reverse proxy for the millions of servers you never get to access directly. All you ever see if this endpoint which fetches the results automatically for you.

curl "http://api.proxiesapi.com/?auth_key=YOUR_KEY&url=http://example.com"

You don't need to know about this to use our service, though, as far as you are concerned, we are a forward proxy representing you to the target website that you want to scrape.