What is a proxy? How does it work?

Proxy Servers

A proxy server is a kind of buffer between your computer and the Internet resources you are accessing. They accumulate and save files that are most often requested by thousands of Internet users in a special database, called the "secret." Therefore, the proxy server can increase the speed of your connection to the Internet. The cache of a proxy server may already contain information that you need before your application, allowing the proxy to deliver it immediately. The overall increase in performance may be very high. In addition, proxy servers can help in cases when some owners of Internet resources impose some restrictions on users from certain countries or geographical regions. In addition to that, among proxy servers there are so called anonymous proxy servers that hide your IP address thereby saving you from vulnerabilities concerned with it.

Anonymous proxy server

Anonymous proxy servers hide your IP address and thereby prevent unauthorized access to your computer through the Internet. They do not provide anyone with your IP address and effectively hide any information about you and your reading interests. Besides that, they do not even have anyone know that you are surfing through a proxy server. Anonymous proxy servers can be used for all kinds of Web-services, such as Web-Mail (Hot mail, Yahoo MSN), web-chat rooms, FTP archives, etc..

Why should you use anonymous proxy server?

Any web resource you access can gather personal information about you through your unique IP address - your ID in the Internet. They can monitor your reading interests, spy on you, and according to some policies of the Internet resources, deny accessing any information you might need. You could become a target for many marketers and advertising agencies who having information about your interests and knowing your IP address as well as your email, you can send regularly their spam emails and junk. A Web site can automatically exploit security holes in your system using hacking programs not-very-complex, ready to use, free. Some of such programs may just hang your machine, making you reset it, but other, more powerful, can gain access to the contents of your hard drive or RAM. Everything that a website may need for that is only your IP address and some information about your operating system. Using an anonymous proxy server you do not, does anyone give any chance to discover your IP address and any information about you and use them in their own interests.