Pound proxy is a great solution for adding a bit of a security layer, flexibility or scalability to your web server(s). If you're doing anything much more complex than hosting a blog, Pound may have some added value for you.

What Pound Is
Pound is a reverse proxy - that means you put it on the server end in front of your web services, not in front of your clients who need to connect to the general Internet. It takes web requests from end-users and distributes them among several web servers or services you may be running. Pound is also load balancing, so you can run multiple servers that look to the outside world as if they are just one, allowing you to spread the workload around.

What Pound Is Not
Pound proxy is NOT a caching proxy. By itself it won't help to speed up your server or network, but there is a lot of flexibility in Pound that will help you overall.

In Ubuntu, installing and using Pound is very easy. Simply install it and configure two files and you're off and running.

apt-get install pound

To enable Pound, you must edit the following file:

/etc/default/pound

Change it from startup=0 to startup=1. Before doing this, Pound will refuse to start.

The primary configuration file is located here:

/etc/pound/pound.cfg