Your Go-To Frontend Server for Scalability and Load-Balancing
May 17, 2017

Your Go-To Frontend Server for Scalability and Load-Balancing

Jonah Dempcy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NGINX

I have used Nginx for years to serve Ruby on Rails applications for a number of clients and with various integrations including Passenger and, more recently, Unicorn. I have found Nginx to be a wonderful choice for both standalone server and layer in front of Unicorn. Nginx excels at serving static files, load-balancing, security (preventing certain exploit attempts) and simply acting as a front end for full-featured application server back-ends.

Pros

  • Nginx excels at serving static assets (images, cached files).
  • Nginx is fantastic for load-balancing and routing requests to back-end application servers.
  • Nginx is built for scaling and is an excellent solution for high-traffic websites.
  • Nginx has good features for protecting against certain security exploits.

Cons

  • Nginx has some peculiarities or "gotchas" that take getting used to.
  • Nginx could improve at SSL handling.
  • Nginx is the best asynchronous server but I could see using Apache for process-based (threaded) serving of dynamic assets as a back-end behind Nginx. So I don't think Nginx should necessarily improve in this regard as much as it's choosing the right tool for the job—Nginx for static serving, other, process-based servers for dynamic serving.
  • Nginx has helped numerous web properties for various clients scale and be served to 100s of thousands of users. It has been an excellent tool in all cases where I have used it.
  • Nginx has slowed down development on a few occasions due to strange gotchas, but these are minor in comparison to the gains in time to market due to easy configuration and a large customer base with many answers to existing issues, plus excellent getting started guides.
  • Nginx has overall had a very positive impact on all of the projects where I have used it by having easy, rapid integration with preferred tools and platforms like Ruby on Rails.
  • Apache Server, Mongrel, Webrick, Puma, Lighttpd and Mongoose
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.
Nginx is perfect as a front layer handling all inbound requests to a website. I would use it just about anywhere as a first line of defense against client requests for its load-balancing, security features and ability to rapidly serve static assets. Nginx is great for websites of all sizes although it is especially helpful for websites getting very high traffic.

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