A server that sits between clients and your actual web servers, intercepting requests and forwarding them behind the scenes. Clients talk to the reverse proxy; they never see your real infrastructure.
Why it matters for bunkerdomains users: reverse proxies hide your origin server's IP address, making it harder for attackers to bypass your domain and hit you directly. They also handle load balancing, caching, TLS termination, and DDoS mitigation. If you're hosting a domain on offshore or bulletproof infrastructure, a reverse proxy adds a critical layer of obfuscation between the public internet and your actual hardware.
Common use cases: anonymity-focused sites, politically sensitive content, crypto projects under pressure, anything that needs to survive probing and targeting. Cloudflare is the mainstream choice, but if you're serious about privacy and avoiding corporate surveillance of your traffic, self-hosted reverse proxies (nginx, Caddy, HAProxy) paired with your own bulletproof hosting give you full control.
Reverse proxies also enable you to rotate backend servers, apply geofencing, or serve different content to different requesters—useful when you need flexible defense strategies.