NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…
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OnApp CDN
Score 9.0 out of 10
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OnApp, headquartered in London, provides a content delivery network (CDN).
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
OnApp CDN is great for virtually any site with a desire or requirement to offload processing resources to a content delivery network in general. The OnApp CDN is one of the largest, if not largest CDNs on the planet and is well equipped to handle virtually any type of file distribution, including video. Video distribution POPs on the OnApp CDN are less available because each host that offers video has special requirements they may or may not be willing to get involved with. If you plan to distribute video on OnApp CDN first check if the number of POPs available for serving video suit your needs
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.
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
We compared VMware for its virtualization capabilities and ended up deciding on OnApp as the UI was more intuitive for less technical support staff, which meant that our customers would have more staff available to help them with cloud related issues. We also checked our Akamai specifically for CDN however again the OnApp platform seemed simpler and less expensive to leverage, and with the added benefit that we had more control of the CDN 'in-house' than using a fully third party platform
By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
OnApp in general has been a good investment, though in the early days this was a questionable result as stability was nothing like what it is today. Things have gotten much better over the years and I would anticipate OnApp to generate ROI so long as customers are looking for cloud and CDN solutions in general. I'm not sure that investing in OnApp as a hosting provider specifically for the CDN capability will generate any positive return, but the OnApp system as a whole has the features required that most should be able to make a return on.
