VPNs are the best known and most used way to surf the net anonymously, connecting to any server in the world, but they are not the only way that exists. There are also proxy servers that behave similarly to VPNs, changing your geographic location and protecting you from the internet.
While VPNs and proxies look similar, their differences are marked in many areas. . In this article we will explain what these differences are and we will go into detail on how VPNs and proxies work.
What a proxy is and how does it work
A proxy server is simply a computer within the network that acts as an intermediary for our internet traffic. Basically, our internet connection
will not be direct from our modem, but it will all pass through the proxy server which will exchange data with the network in our place, thus making us anonymous, since the IP address with which we connect to the network is not the ours, but it is that of the proxy server. The more informed will have already noticed that the operation just explained is very similar to that of a VPN server, but with substantial differences. A proxy server does not care about encrypting data or protecting it in any way, it is just an internet network filter, which does not affect the performance of the network much and can therefore handle many simultaneous connections. Instead a VPN server connects directly to a node in the network through a technique called tunneling, which routes the packets to the server which then exchanges them with the network in an encrypted manner.
