A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed within the neighborhood of one or more servers. Typically, reverse proxies are utilized in front of webservers. All connections coming from the Internet addressed to one of the webservers are routed through the proxy server, which may either deal with the request itself or pass the request wholly or partially to the main webserver.
A reverse proxy is called so because it acts as a proxy for in-bound traffic to a bunch of servers hidden behind a single IP address (eg. a cluster of web servers all serving content for the same domain). Contrast this to a ‘forward proxy’ which acts as a proxy for out-bound traffic (eg. an ISP forwarding and most likely also caching HTTP traffic from all the internal clients to external web servers on the internet).
Squid is a proxy server and web cache daemon. It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, to caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, to aiding security by filtering traffic. Although primarily used for HTTP and FTP, Squid includes limited support for several other protocols including TLS, SSL, Internet Gopher and HTTPS.[1] The development version of Squid (3.0) includes preliminary IPv6 support.
lighttpd (pronounced “lighty”) is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license. lighttpd runs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. Under Windows, it can be controlled using the standalone program Lighty Tray.