Pound

Free plan LinuxSelf-hosted

What Pound is

Pound is a free, self-hosted reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front end for Linux web servers. It checks incoming browser requests and forwards well-formed traffic to one or more backend servers, distributing requests while preserving session information. Routing can use source IP addresses, URLs, or request headers. Session tracking can rely on client IP, Basic authentication, URL parameters, cookies, HTTP parameters, or header values. Pound terminates HTTPS and can pass requests to backends as plain HTTP. It supports ACME HTTP-01 challenges and can serve challenge files directly. When a backend fails, Pound stops sending requests there and resumes after recovery. Optional build support includes Lua extensions, DNS-based dynamic backends, and PCRE or PCRE2 regular expressions. A Metrics backend can return OpenMetrics telemetry. Pound uses file-based configuration and supports WebSocket connections. Building requires OpenSSL 1.1.x or 3.0.x. The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.

Who it suits

Pound suits Linux administrators running self-hosted services who need request routing, HTTPS termination, load balancing, and session persistence. It is intended for deployments configured through files.

What it does well

Free Linux self-hosted deployment
Terminates HTTPS and supports ACME HTTP-01
Routes using IP, URL, or request headers
Stops routing to failed backends
Supports WebSocket connections

What to know first

Does not cache requests
Documentation says it is not a web accelerator
Building requires OpenSSL 1.1.x or 3.0.x
Configuration is file-based

Verdict

Pound provides focused proxying, HTTPS termination, routing, and failover for self-hosted Linux services. Its lack of response caching makes it unsuitable when caching is required.

Facts from Pound's own pages

ACME: Pound supports ACME HTTP-01 challenges and can serve challenge files directly. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Dynamic backends: Optional DNS-based dynamic backends can be built using GNU adns when that library is available. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Extensions: Lua extensions can implement special backends when Lua support is enabled at build time. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Failover: It stops sending requests to a backend when it fails and resumes sending them when it recovers. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
HTTPS: It can decrypt HTTPS requests and pass them to backends as plain HTTP. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
HTTPS and ACME: It can terminate HTTPS and supports ACME HTTP-01 challenges for certificate issuance. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Integrations: Optional build support includes Lua extensions, DNS-based dynamic backends, and Perl-compatible regular expressions through PCRE or PCRE2. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
License: Pound is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Metrics: A special backend can generate an OpenMetrics telemetry response. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
No caching: Pound does not cache requests; it passes each request to a backend. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Notable limits: Pound does not cache requests, and its documentation says it is not a web accelerator. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Purpose: Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front end for web servers. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Request handling: It forwards browser requests to one or more backend servers and can distribute requests while keeping session information. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Request routing: It can route requests to backend servers based on criteria such as source IP address, URL, or request headers. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Request validation: It checks requests for correctness and accepts only well-formed requests. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Routing: Services can be selected using criteria such as source IP address, URL, or request headers. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Security: The project describes Pound as a small program that can run setuid/setgid or in a chroot jail and does not access the hard disk except to read certificate files at startup when required. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Session persistence: Session tracking can use client IP, Basic authentication, URL parameters, cookies, HTTP parameters, or header values. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Support: The maintainer directs bug reports to email addresses [email protected] and [email protected] or the GitHub issue tracker. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
Telemetry: A special Metrics backend generates an OpenMetrics telemetry response. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
TLS dependency: Building Pound requires OpenSSL version 1.1.x or 3.0.x. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026
What it does: Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front-end for web servers. · github.com, 8 Oct 2026

Where Pound stands on Freedom251

Reverse Proxy Software#25 of 33