we might want to protect our servers, hosting our web or any other services, by hiding it from the public, or we might want to reduce the burden our servers stand to bring up the normal functionality of our products. proxy server might help on this. instead of talking to the hosts directly, the end users talk to the proxy server for what they want from the website. and also by caching the content on the proxy server, we can speed up the reply to the requests from the end users and also with some configuration, we can load-balance the traffic among all the servers available.
and sometimes, as end users, we might want to hid ourselves from the server side when we talk to them to reduce the security risk or unnecessary personal information disclosure. that’s where VPN can play a role, to pretending the request is from somewhere else than where we really are.
it might be easy to get either of them set up for personal use, but when it comes to the companies, or large scale of end users and servers, that becomes much more difficult. but getting familiar with the basic settings and how it really works will definitely help us when it comes to such situations.
some people just stay where they are, satisfied; some people look forward to some place further, but too afraid of the unknown to take the first step out; but I think we should keep curiosity to the surroundings and the future, to the ahead, and more importantly, take the steps towards what we want and what we are interested in.