this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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Could you help me learn something conceptually about a reverse proxy?
My understanding is that Virtual Private Servers (vps) charge for bandwidth after you exceed a free cap.
If I set up nextcloud behind a reverse proxy, so that I'm not exposing my residential IP address to the internet, does that mean that when I upload a 500 gigabyte file, let's say, I will incur 500 gigabytes of usage on the virtual private server?
Or is there some system where once you log in to your server, it is smart enough to make a direct connection from the client to the residential IP and bypass the reverse proxy?
In your example it would use that much and no it can't be shortcut, that'd be a big security bug and is not intended.
The reverse proxy is just a piece of software and can be on the same machine as the actual service, but yeah, if you don't have a public IP at home, you'll need someone like you described and it will need the traffic.
I think there's different software that does hole punching and actually gets you a peer to peer connection but there's more vpn territory where the vps is just used to find a way between the peers.
For most use cases, the free traffic is usually enough though.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, that helps a lot