Reverse proxies are primarily designed to hide physical and logical internal structures from outside access. Complete Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) or Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) can be partially or completely redirected without disclosing which internal or demilitarized zone (DMZ) server is providing the requested data. This technology might be used if a trade-off between security, performance and costs has to be achieved. Proxy servers cache some data but normally cannot cache all pages to be published because this depends on the kind of information the web servers provide. The ability to accelerate access depends on the speed of the back-end servers, i.e., those that are cached. Thus, without making further assumptions, a gain in speed cannot be assured, but virtualization and hiding of internal structures can. If speed is an issue, a scale-out approach (avoiding adding additional delays by passing firewalls, involving more servers, etc.) would be a better solution. Due to the limited caching option, reverse proxies are not suitable for enhancing fault tolerance. User requests that are handled by reverse proxy servers are using exactly the same bandwidth as direct requests to the hosts providing the data.