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Making Net-surfing as Easy as Pie

The Internet is a wonderful invention of the modern world. It unites us with people all over the world. It allows us to view information that we would otherwise be unavailable to us. Using it is probably easier than "easy as pie". And one of the things that helps us access the Internet, is the proxy server.

A proxy server is something like an mediator between the computer you are using and the server that you are trying to access. This concept becomes easier to understand once you manage to understand its working. Suppose there is a website that is accessed time after time from a particular computer. This site gets saved in the cache of the proxy server. Subsequently, when the following user tries viewing that site, the page is pulled up from this cache.

The advantage of this style of functioning is that the process becomes noticeably faster. This is because the proxy server can manage without getting in touch with the real server of that website to view it. The site has already been placed in the proxy server's cache.

Web proxies are proxy servers that limit their job to online sites. Sometimes web proxies are used to intercede websites that are provocative or offensive. They also serve another, perhaps more important, function of blocking viruses that may be present on the webpages that are in the process of being visited. In fact, a number of organizations make use of proxy servers to perform these very functions. A company could even intercede its employees from viewing a particular website by making use of a proxy server. Notably, the user himself may be ignorant of the work of the proxy server.

There are many other kinds of proxy servers that are observed at work on the net. These include transparent proxies, split proxies and reverse proxies. Open proxies are proxy servers that are the haunts of spammers and Internet Relay Chat users.

There is also something called an anonymous proxy server. This is used to furnish anonymity, and hence, privacy, to the user. It does this by hiding the IP address of the user. As a result, the number of junk mails and spam that one would otherwise get a profusion of are reduced noticeably. It is good to use an anonymous proxy server because it keeps you protected from hackers.

Certainly, there is far more to proxies than this. But the next time you are able to quickly access your favorite webpage, remember that your invisible friend -- the proxy server -- is at work!

By: Ajeet Khurana

The author Ajeet Khurana recommends Squid Myspace Proxy, Web Messenger, and Unlock Myspace.

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