[yc1010]

See my reply here in same thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834476

Basically having a http proxy (im not talking about web proxies but forward and reverse ones such as tinyproxy & haproxy) has its uses for example if you have a robot scraping via multiple addresses (to bypass limits for example or scrape different content dependant on location)

and well they are simpler to setup and use that vpns both on client on and server end

a vpn is fine in most cases but there are usecases where a quick and dirty http proxy helps save alot of headaches.