NGINX Reviews

NGINX's footprint is much smaller than Apache, and it's great for serving up static content. The URL rewriting was not as familiar as Apache, but just as powerful once configured correctly. As a load balancer, it's much more affordable than Citrix ADC. We used the load balancing features for several years as a startup and it served us well.

NGINX has been more stable and customizable than we have had with APACHE.

HA proxy is designed explicitly for proxying requests. It works well for this purpose, handling extremely high volumes with little issue. However, it lacks some of the features NGINX provides for running application servers. For our purposes, NGINX provided us with a high amount of flexibility while still being the more commonly used product which lowered the barrier to entry.

Compared to Apache, NGINX is much lighter on resource consumption, and also far faster as a server, serving static content over twice as fast in most benchmark tests. NGINX doesn't offer as much potential configuration and customization as Apache, however, so if these advanced features are necessary then Apache might be the way to go.

Nginx is way easier to configure and runs better than Microsoft’s offering, in my opinion, and I’ll take it over Apache for its simplicity.

Nginx's cache mechanism is better than Apache and HAProxy. Also Nginx is very light weight and works for multiple sites with much less work. i.e. As front end proxy server configuration is very easy as compared to other applications. Apache sometimes crashes and is not able to mange a high load as compared to Nginx. Apache Tomcat suits application servers but not for load balancing or cache server or front end proxy or reverse proxy also the same is true for HAProxy. HAProxy's load balancing feature is really good but comparing other features, Nginx is the best.

Apache is still widely used by the software community and can accomplish many of the same things Nginx can. Nginx is a better solution when you are serving static content (vs. dynamic content), are on a Unix-system, and have a high-traffic website. In addition, certain things like Load Balancing and Reverse Proxies are easier to setup in Nginx.

NetApp, f1, etc., [I've] used them all. I find using commodity hardware across diverse endpoints running software solutions is cheaper while being more available than individual hardware solutions. and I find Nginx to be the best proxy solution that can do everything we need.

Apache has the advantage of being very widely supported and well-known, which makes integration with various tools and software simple, whereas Nginx often requires manual configuration to achieve the same thing. However, the ease of use, configurability, and relatively small footprint of Nginx makes up for its smaller support base, as, once configured, it provides better performance and usability than Apache.

Other Web servers are either not performant enough or locked to a platform. The main competitor in my opinion is the Apache Web Server, that can be extended in functionality through a diverse set of modules to perform almost any task related to a network server. But at scale, I feel Nginx grows more linearly and can be more predictable on resource usage. Apache, specially when using external modules, can be more buggy or memory hungry due to implementation intrinsics of each third party's code.

Other web servers like IIS, J2EE server or even the new .NET Core Kestrel web server are locked to a platform, Windows for IIS, Java or .NET for the other 2. If you don't work with their platforms, they don't have a use case on the architecture.

We were happy to drop Apache to serve our applications.

Microsoft IIS server is not open source and it comes with its own overhead in terms of cost which is not the case with Nginx as we do not need to purchase a handful of other products in order to get an HTTP server up and running. If I compare it to Apache Server, it dramatically is better in serving the pages quickly hence it is very fast and efficient in serving the requests in a more timely manner. Apache lags in speed a lot and implementing an Nginx server can increase the speed of your website up to 10x (no kidding).

Nginx works on basic operating system principles and what I like the most about it is that even after being feature-rich and easily customizable it uses minimum resources.

Configuration options are easier on Nginx. It's better suited for our cases. It's easier to find specialists for Nginx in our area.

Nginx struck the right balance for us of raw speed, power, convenience, and simplicity.

• I don't like the idea of hosting all of our open source PHP-based websites on Microsoft Windows servers with IIS, so that option was out first.
• Next, we had experience with Apache already, and were initially considering sticking with that, however it was decided that it would take too much administration time to properly configure and tune the server, especially considering it would need to occur on an ongoing basis.
• I've personally had experience with Litespeed Web Server, but we wanted something a little bit lower level--we don't need to actually manage our virtual hosts within an admin UI, and we wanted to stick with open source as much as possible. One huge benefit of Litespeed, however, is that it's .htaccess-compatible, meaning it's a much smaller transition from Apache in some cases.
• LightTPD was the closest contender to Nginx when all was said and done. We chose Nginx because some of us were more familiar with it or had some experience with it, and Nginx seemed to have more documentation and resources online for finding assistance at the time.

It's lightweight and it does not require complex configurations for simple scenarios. If you want you can accomplish some other complicated tasks like reverse proxies which are well supported by the product.

When we did load and performance testing we got better results with Nginx

Nnginx is more light-weight than many other web servers, has a very expressive configuration language, easier to configure than tools like IIS and Apache, easy to install certificates for SSL, much easier to model complex routing scenarios than IIS, easier to configure than Apache. Overall, it's the leanest, best web server for services-oriented architectures (including microservices).

Before using Nginx with Passenger, we had Apache servers in front of Mongrel for our rails apps. They would leak memory, and need periodic restarts to stay online. The memory management on Apache and Mongrel was very inefficient. Nginx does great with both speed and memory efficiency, while maintaining uptime and even distribution of load across back-end app servers. This made it an easy choice for us.

Nginx is one of the top three web servers and sits in the second position in terms of the amount of servers deployed. The main competition comes from Apache and Apache-based forks on Linux based servers, and less-so from Microsoft IIS on Windows based servers. As stated earlier, a web server is really a "per project" decision, and the server that is best for one project might not be any good for a different project. However, I personally recommend that NginX should deserve a serious consideration for every project, as it continues to become faster, and more capable with each release.

Nginx is simply the best for static assets and as a front-end for dynamic webservers. Nginx is so easy to set up and get up and running with a scalable, solid asynchronous server that uses far less resources out of the box than the equivalent configuration with, say, Apache Web Server. Nginx is simply the go-to solution for a front end server that is built to handle a massive amount of requests with ease.

As I mentioned before, I'd chose Nginx over HAProxy any day. It's just simpler to use, has more features and less quirks.

Nginx has easier configuration options and speeds up the time to serve up the websites. Apache is much older and has more complicated configuration options. However, Apache's much broader config files allows for more complex situations, which may make it better in those cases. Overall, I think Nginx is the better suited software for most use cases.

I selected Nginx because it is easy to learn, use, and maintain. I almost never have to troubleshoot it ever since I deploy it. It just meets my need for a personal learning experience. It works well with PHP and MySQL on Linux. That is why I chose it at first.