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Discussion on: Nginx concepts I wish I knew years ago

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Andrei Dascalu

HTTP reverse proxy is a server (as in general term). Web server serves web content (as in WWW, eg: html/js). Sure, it's hair splitting, but the difference can be important in certain contexts. Eg: HAProxy is a reverse proxy, but NOT a web server as it's unable to actually serve content (it can only proxy it).

IMHO it's important to know the tools and what they can do to choose what's right.
A proxy can be, for example, a HTTP proxy or a TCP proxy. Some proxies can do both, some can only do HTTP by design.