Quite a few reasons: - SSL: You can put a bunch of things behind a reverse proxy and you can put all your SSL stuff in one place, which makes it a lot easier t

Quite a few reasons: - SSL: You can put a bunch of things behind a reverse proxy and you can put all your SSL stuff in one place, which makes it a lot easier to deal with, secure and manage. - Load balancing: If your application needs more than one host, you need some way of distributing requests to multiple hosts. A reverse proxy is one of the easiest ways of achieving this (and comes with above SSL handling as well) - Caching: They can be very good for caching dynamic but rarely changing resources like news articles. They can also take care of requests for static assets so that your application servers don't have to. - Multiple apps on a single IP: At the other end of the spectrum, if you have for example a home server, only one application can listen on a given port and you might want to run multiple applications responding to different hostnames. A reverse proxy lets you do this.