Likelihood to Recommend The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.
Read full review [NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
Read full review Pros Very performant and fast -- major companies have drastically reduced page load times with Fastly's edge technology. Support for many types of media, including video. Image add-on makes serving and manipulating images very simple. Read full review Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture). Great at serving static content. Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability. Open-Source (no cost)! Read full review Cons WAF is hard to configure. No comprehensive rate limiting without a pricey upgrade. Account access controls are extremely limited. Read full review Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue? I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this. It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work. It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together. I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Great value for the product
Read full review Usability Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application . Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective . Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
Read full review Support Rating John Reeve Principal, Lead developer, Lead designer
Read full review Alternatives Considered It’s the fastest and most configurable.
Read full review We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely Read full review Return on Investment Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs. Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated. Read full review Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache. Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy"). Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly. Read full review ScreenShots