Nginx Reviews

Nginx is very stable and uses less memory than other web servers. Most content delivery networks and high-volume websites use nginx because of their speed. You can easily configure it as a reverse proxy, which makes it work as a web server that acts as a bridge and connects to another web server.

The configuration can be a barrier for more advanced needs. But that is true for any web-based software. The community is very good at giving examples of these scenarios. It is not as simple as installing a module in Apache, but that is also what makes it more powerful is the decoupling.

Do not be afraid to replace your apache server with Nginx, this is much more powerful, it is lighter and consumes much less resources, so this translates into a saving of money in the choice of server.

We have several blogs with Wordpress and a cdn of images and we can say that we are using less server resources than with Apache, which saves us money in costs of selecting a server, by not having to choose a server "bestial"

Nginx es muy estable y utiliza menos memoria que otros servidores web. La mayoría de las redes de entrega de contenido y sitios web de gran volumen utilizan nginx debido a su velocidad. Puede configurarlo fácilmente como un proxy inverso, que lo hace funcionar como un servidor web que actúa como puente y se conecta a otro servidor web.

La configuración puede ser una barrera para necesidades más avanzadas. Pero eso es cierto para cualquier software basado en web. La comunidad es muy buena para dar ejemplos de estos escenarios. No es tan sencillo como instalar un módulo en Apache, pero eso es también lo que lo hace más potente es el desacoplamiento.

No tenga miedo en reemplazar su servidor apache por Nginx, este es mucho mas poderoso , es mas ligero y consume muchos menos recursos, por lo que esto se traduce en un ahorro de dinero en la elección del servidor.

Tenemos varios blogs con Wordpress y un cdn de imágenes y podemos decir que estamos utilizado menos recursos del servidor que con apache, lo que nos ahorra dinero en costes de selección de un servidor, al no tener que escoger un servidor "bestial"

It has all the minimum requirement which are needed to getting started with your application. Flexible and ease of using while using as UI server with multiple backend endpoint management. Installation is super easy. The Docker version is also very useful and helpful to start and ship the solution in minimum time. Good community support. Flexible configuration.

As far as I have used, there is no advance cacheing mechanism which can be tuned or customised according to the need. Also, it would be good if there are some third party plugin and integration for cashing images and other resources.

It has all the basic features to be used for UI server and sometime for managing your DNS (sub-domain) related things.

There are a couple of them, initially we were not using any service for managing our DNS so we used Nginx for handling all these components, however as we wanted some other advance features from scalable perspective we moved on. Now all our UI(angular) code is residing in Nginx and multiple API server each UI is handled like a breeze :)

Nginx does what it does very well. It's very fast (I've used it just as a proxy server before), handles concurrency well, and is super configurable. At work, we spin up servers often and we want to be able to easily host multiple sites on a single server. By setting up localized nginx configurations, we can be up and running without having to hardly tweak the main server at all.

Occasionally there will be issues that are easily fixed by adding something to .htaccess. Since Nginx doesn't have that support, I have to find a workaround, but thus far that's the only thing I can find that I dislike.

If you have never used Nginx and you're hesitant to throw it into a big project, try using it on a side project first. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

We use it primarily as a proxy server to direct all our sites through. It's been incredibly easy to get up and running, even across multiple servers, and is a true pleasure to work with.

Nginx require so few resources compared to Apache. In the same way that the Chrome browser replaced industry stalwarts, Nginx has given us a great alternative to Apache. I use Nginx to run some popular open source software and it does great. We have also used it as a load balancer in the past because it is an affordable alternative to commercial load balancers.

Configuration can be a barrier for more advanced needs . But that is true of any web based software. The community is great in providing examples for these scenarios. It's not as straightforward as installing a module in Apache, but that is also what makes it more powerful is the decoupling.

We run blogs with Wordpress and stat collecting sites using Piwik. We can run it on less resources which saves us money in hosting costs.

My team uses NGinX for configuring our development servers and locations, using variables, rewriting URIs to redirect to the appropriate service based on hostname. NGinX makes this process light and easy. We develop multiple different sites and services. NGinX is lightweight and you can be up and running quickly. It does everything I need as a web server and I really have no complaints so far.

NGinX is really for high level server admins. I can be complex because all the configurations are text based files and if you do not understand what you are doing it will cause issues.

We benefit by using NGinX as our primary development web server that points traffic to the correct corresponding service base on hostname. This allows development to easily work on multiple projects with multiple languages and/or versions simultaneously.

Nginx is very stable and uses less memory then other web servers. Most content delivery networks and large volume websites use nginx because of its speed. You can easily set it up as a reverse proxy, which is having it run as a webserver that acts as a bridge and connects to another web server.

The configuration can be a bit tricky. Most web applications are ready to be deployed using Apache and you have to play with the nginx configuration to get it to work. If you want it to work with something like PHP, you have to have PHP running as a server and cant just be loaded into Nginx as a module.

The last time I used nginx was to setup a server with both a PHP and JSP website. I used nginx as a reverse proxy and was able to run Apache (for PHP) and Tomcat (for JSP) all in one website. The benefit is if you have someone wanting a website built in PHP but wants to retain their existing website built in JSP, you can do that with nginx.

Nginx is super simple to set up and it is lightning FAST!

If you ever run into an issue, there is a lot of support both on NGINX's site and also on Stackoverflow.

I dislike how different apache and nginx are. If you spend a long time using one product then try to port everything to a different web server, it can sometimes be difficult to translate between the syntax.

If you want a simple, lightweight web server, look no further. Nginx solves this problem with ease. Between nginx and apache, there is not much difference other than speed. nginx is FAST FAST FAST!

Nginx has allowed our server to serve pages quicker and with less errors than other web servers out there.

We have realized the benefits of quick webpage serving, which in turn allows our team to be more efficient and get the information they need faster.

Nginx is very solid for my needs. I've never run into any trouble with it, even under higher loads. The ease of reloading configuration changes is a high point, as is the smart syntax of its configuration. In addition, since the configuration is very flexible, I've been able to easily configure SSL connections to meet the stringent encryption security requirements demanded by our customers.

It doesn't have as large a community as Apache HTTPd, and a lot of software assumes you're using that. This often means translating configuration to something compatible with nginx. The rewrite syntax is very different than that of mod_rewrite (for Apache HTTPd), and often cannot be transliterated directly.

Keep in mind that my experience with nginx is primarily as a reverse proxy. For that purpose, it is a great tool. Using it as a load balancer, it is more configurable and handles better than a dedicated appliance like a NetScaler. Keep in mind that if you want some of the advanced features advertised like easy add and removal of nodes, you'll need the commercial Plus offering. If you're in need of those features, however, it's a great value.

I'm using nginx to offload SSL termination for a web application by reverse proxy. It also acts as a bit of protection from directly exposing the back-end HTTP server to the public. While acting as a load balancer, it makes it easy to cycle nodes out for upgrades and/or maintenance with minimal public disturbance, reducing the duration of scheduled maintenance.

Open source, high performance webserver (and beyond with the modules) that can scale large amounts of connections without an issue. A lot of the additional modules provide support for other features or protocols - and in the newest versions, modules can be dynamically loaded too now.

Nginx provides very fast support when used as the front-end webserver and proxying back to another one [locally], such as Apache for the specific applications that may require .htaccess to still work.

I'm not entirely sure there's a whole lot to dislike about it. Nginx is pretty much a drop in replacement for any other webserver using different SAPI's via fastcgi instead or modules. It does lack .htaccess support that is still ever so needed at times based on customer applications.

Seriously, you can't go wrong using nginx! As long as you have everything properly tuned accordingly, it should only increase performance and response time.

If you have the requirement of using .htaccess still, you can still run the site via nginx and just proxy it back to Apache.

We're able to scale wordpress extremely well using nginx+php-fpm+fastcgi caching for commonly requested pages, so the webserver doesn't have to re-process them if found in cache.

Nginx is also the webserver being used for BelugaCDN -- although the CDN proxy is written in Go.

Nginx does its job as web server very well. Thanks to its design it can handle high-concurrency web requests very well, and it also works very well for a load-balancing reverse proxy server.

Does not have a PHP module like Apache (requires php-fpm).

Text-based configuration file is not very user-friendly.

If you are looking for a high-performance light-weight web server, or a load balancer, Nginx is the correct choice. Highly recommended!

We are using Nginx as a load-balancer for the web console of our internal private cloud platform, as well as our internal object-storage system.

Nginx went a long way from a simple proxy server for assets to powerful multi-purpose server. You literally can solve any complicated server-side tasks as redirects, URL manipulation, load balancing, caching, prevent DDoS attacks and etc.

At the same time, there are some limitations. Nginx configuration is pretty strict. E.g., it supports "if" condition but doesn't support "else" condition. To solve more complicate tasks you have to write scripts on LUA.

Don't be afraid to replace your Apache with Nginx. It's much more powerful and can bring significant benefits.

Web server for serving content, load balancing, CDN, complicated redirect rules. It can easily replace a bunch of paid services from Amazon or any other Cloud providers.

Nginx is a web server of choice in terms of performance and handling heavy load and web traffic. If we are talking about an open-source web server, Apache is the most well-known HTTP server among developers but Nginx is the one that addresses the performance and scalability problem of Apache. Nginx's asynchronous and event-driven structure is more efficient than Apache. To sum up, Go Nginx for applications that require high concurrency, high performance and multi-threading. For small and medium scaled web applications, Apache can handle just fine and also its built-in supports of some programming languages is also pretty nice.

I think it is better to compare the drawbacks of Nginx over Apache. Apache is a lot older than Nginx, which means that Apache community is bigger and more available modules and extensions than Nginx. Also, it doesn't work quite well with Windows OS.

If you are Linux users and get a support for configuration of your web applications, Nginx is a perfect solution.

Go check Nginx "Getting started" page and try out yourself. The configuration provided from the Ngix community makes my life a lot easier at early point.

URL : https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/

We have a few web applications that getting slow down after high web traffic load and after replacing Apache with Nginx, it can be seen that it uses moderate computational resources and handles web traffic better than Apache.

Nginx is a reliable, fast, and a lightweight web server. The reverse proxy is powerful and can be tied to multiple security and performance features that make this tool indispensable in my workflow.

I wish that Nginx Plus was the same exact code base, with just an option to enable it with a license key. Having two different source trees makes it more difficult than it should be.

IP address blocking, rate-limiting and HTTP2 allow us to build a front end to some of our older web applications that will give us features out the box to do more. We have been able to do load balancing and rate limiting on multiple applications.

The configuration files are very simple to setup: from running simple PHP and SSL to proxying and load balancing. A Nginx newbie can perform advanced web server tasks with little difficulty. The community is strong, and Nginx is proofed to be much faster than competitors.

It doesn't work very well in Windows systems when running as a service daemon. Aside of that, everything is just right.

You'll make the right choice if you pick up Nginx. It won't be hard picking it up and it will pay very quickly.

I host dozens of websites and Nginx has helped me understand my web server configuration files easier. It takes a different approach: you only need to configure the basic stuff, and customise the advanced stuff only if you want. It's a great advantage to Apache in which you must configure the basic and advanced stuff, even you don't know what you're playing around. This way the learning curve of Nginx is much more kind.

Nginx is a powerful web servicing tool which enables our team to easily and quickly set up a considerably large array of different development environments for web based applications

The aspect in which I think we could be better serverd using Nginx is the one regarding documentation. Sometimes is a bit difficult to assess if Nginx does provide a certain complex feature we need in our development environment and if so how exactly to go about it

Nginx allows our development team to provide a quicker response time when addressing applicational bugs or the implementation of new features, thus making it easier to comply with SLA's.

This is very easy to setup web servers on different ports. The configuration documentation is easy to understand and there are plenty of discussion boards to find help on how to make a configuration change.

The version of Nginx supplied with Ubuntu 14.04 did not come with many modules. This is remedied by using the Nginx repository to install Nginx.

We had to change the IP address of a server to a hostname. We were able to create a temporary web server to listen to the old port and redirect users to the new address.

it doesnt create an extra process per connection. load balancer buildin proving insane speed advantage over apache. it also supports FastCGI and SCGI for our php applications.

many applications deployed on the server don't go well with the default settings out of the box with nginx. i highly recommend they change that in the future to make the transition from apache more seamless.

We no longer need to use caching system on our server. after couple of modifications, no one using the server noticed any change. i highly recommend you refer to this http://www.hostingadvice.com/how-to/nginx-vs-apache/

I find Nginx's configuration very simple and understandable.

Nothing that I dislike about it, unless maybe that there's less documentation and help on it than there is on something like Apache.

In our research team, we use Nginx as a lightweight caching server inside Docker containers. The configuration was very easy to setup and the throughput has been seemingly good for our needs. In our case, we cache thousands of small images through Nginx in one of research projects.

Speed. Using it as a front end proxy for Django WSGI server, I'm able to realize much better performance for concurrent sessions than a typical HTTPD setup.

Nothing. It's free, easy to set up, and does what I need it to.

If your experience is at all like mine, it'll probably be the most headache-free piece of your implementation.

My business case has a lot of user downtime, with spikes of activity. Consequently, concurrent sessions is something I need to think about and this (plus a WSGI server+Django) lets me be less process-bound than if I were using HTTPD.

I prefer nginx because it works really fast under high loads and in combination with php-fpm produces magic.

It's bit harder to set applications to run on nginx. Had some hard time setting WordPress link structure

Speed, reliability, performance

Simple scriptable configurations for a blazing fast web server. Nginx excels at proxying and provides an excellent solution for application-delivery controllers, SSL termination, WebSocket negotiation, caching, static content delivery and more. Nginx also has some very cool related projects, like OpenRESTy that provide additional layers of support for REST services including bringing JWT handling to Nginx - allowing you to work with JWT auth for even static resources without hitting backend applications or services. Nginx provides robust load-balancing strategies for handling standard/clustered application delivery. Nginx plugins extend the value even further.

The documentation isn't as pretty as other projects which can be a little challenging at times. They could certainly do with more robust examples. Furthermore, the nature of extensibility via scripting is leading to some really bad practices - introducing business logic to the proxy/application-delivery-controller. I see a large body of work that represents poor separation of concerns. Just because it can be done - and it performs well - doesn't make it a good decision for your architecture.

Make sure to get a solid understanding of your SSL needs and how to implement them with Nginx. SSL termination mixed with application delivery via Nginx proxies is an incredibly powerful tool.

We've been able to reduce costs by reducing the number of edge node servers and their resources while increasing capacity. We have greatly increased our caching efficiency and been able to introduce consistent messaging for application errors across a breadth of underlying applications and services - provided by a multitude of technology stacks.

It offers good performance and has been rock solid stable for our use. We have been able to create a standardized hosting solution where only a few parameters need to be changed for almost any website.

There isn't anything that I don't dislike about Nginx, works perfectly for us

Delivering web pages and doing ssl termination. With nginx we can do both without the need to have any axtra components in our stack.

The non-blocking, event-driven nature of Nginx means you can support multiple, concurrent connections and properly route traffic to backing services like PHP or Node or even Varnish efficiently. The build-in microcache alleviates much of the need for external caching applications, too!

Changes to configuration settings require reloading all of the application's configuration files in order to take effect (in comparison with other systems that merely reload and parse configuration files as needed.

Remember that configuration changes require a restart/reload in order to take effect. This includes some URL routing, HTTP authentication, new service inclusion, etc.

We needed a dynamic front-end server that could fill the need of either a webserver or a proxy or a load-balancer. Existing tools (like Apache) worked as a server, but not as a proxy or load-balancer. Using a single tool (Nginx) has helped lessen setup time and make ongoing management much more efficient.

Built to solve the c10k problem (allowing a web server to accept 10k concurrent connections with a low memory footprint) it's the most performant web server you can use.

The configuration language is simple and very close to the syntax used by Apache HTTPd server.

It supports multiple backends to proxy applications (or micro services) built with any programming language.

I really rely on Nginx and there is nothing I dislike.

Be aware that it has been engineered to work on top of the linux kernel, so the Windows version can not give you the same amazing performances you get on linux systems. At least this is true at time of writing this review.

Just use it, and do it on Linux, it will save you a lot of troubles when your websites or your applications will grow in traffic and concurrent users.

We use it for proxying uWSGI served python web applications, to give consistent SSL support to web applications or micro services that doesn't support themselves.

I personally use it even for LAN file sharing, launching a docker container as needed.

Ease of setup and speed, it is lean and does what it needs to do very well, leaving you to decide how to run each piece of your stack behind it.

Not many disadvantages, lack of something like .htaccess might be one of them, but it is a tradeoff to have better speed.

If you are looking for an async http server, you serve a lot of static files or you want to squeeze out every ounce of power from small servers, nginx is your guy.

We are serving a few web services behind nginx, it makes it super easy to configure our microservices architecture.

Nginx is such a versatile application, it serves for a lot of purposes!

The fact that it allows so many possibilities, also make it challenging to tune in sometimes!

Go for it! It's agreat tool, very robust, very flexible and very stable!

I use it as a reverse proxy for my apps, so that I don't have to expose my internal endpoints. Everything goes trough nginx.

Nginx is fast, much faster than Apache in my experiences. Nginx has a strong community, and lots of help is available.

It can be difficult to configure. Configuration files can be a bit more difficult to understand and administer than Apache files.

I needed a web server to shuttle requests to various application environments. PHP, Ruby, Python, even reverse proxy, all worked.

Using nginx is such an obvious thing in any environment that it is even hard to explain for people not familiar with it.

It is amazingly versatile for any kind of setup and I've been using it as a load balancer, a steamer, as a web application firewall. Even used it to fetch HTML directly from a memcache server with just a simple configuration file.

While having the ability to do Apache style .htaccess configurations per directory would help people coming from that mentality. I don't necessarily see that as a good thing to have.

Handling a lot of traffic with fewer hardware and being able to quickly adapt to different services and software behind the HTTP server.

Is fast, nonblocking, stable, cheap on resources and relatively full on features

Does not accept Apache config files. Does not have integrated UI

Is not as standard than Apache, but have cookbooks for everything that matters

Its nonblocking behaviour let my application workers free to receive requests instead of locked on clients downloads of the responses

I love that it has a very low memory footprint and performs well under load. I enjoy that it is easily configurable. It supports all the things you'd expect: SSL, websockets, reverse proxy etc.

It's not always the most well documented. It's also definitely not as standard as Apache

DIgitalOcean has some nice examples of nginx configuration.

I use nginx to serve rails, php and flask applications

Best event driven reverse proxy ever. Blazing fast and easy to configure for easy setups.

Difficult to configure on complex architectures and sometimes hard to understand the rules interpretation order

Study the option. They are basically limitless but can be difficult to make them coexist because the interpretation order is often hard to grasp

I'm using it as reverse proxy in my system architecture

The fact that it is much faster than Apache.

A bit more to config than Apache, but that's okay because it makes it better at the same time.

Its great for caching and allows your sites to be much faster, gives you great flexibility and setup for your sever.

By speeding up websites. We use it as a proxy for static assets.

Tons of good options for common things like reverse proxying, ssl termination, load balancing, rate limiting, etc.

Not much. It's very robuts, documentation is OK and it's quite easy to find information about how to do specific things with it.

Just make sure you really need it first. If you do, then go for it. It's a really good piece of tool.

SSL termination, reverse proxying, load balancing, serving static content.

The performance and the flexibility are the best advantages of Nginx

Default security. People are still uneducated to maintain it by default. It's not like Apache

Try the PageSpeed plugin from Google :)

The strangest thing we did was an rtsp proxy for restreaming video.

Easy configurable and extremely fast, SSL, websockets, reverse proxy and much more.

Some aspects of configuration not documented well, also there is sometimes many ways to do same things in config

I use nginx as http server with php and php-fpm

Nginx has a very low memory footprint and performs very well under load. It also supports a number of useful features like SSL and GZIP.

Configuration can be tricky sometimes. But there are tutorials available.

Nginx is definitely a very mature and reliable product. It won't let you down.

We use nginx to add SSL to our backend and to GZIP compress our content before it is sent to clients as well as to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPs. Nginx provides all the features we need (including web sockets pricing) at no cost.

Nginx takes some of the voodoo out of web servers. I can get up and running quickly with caching, compression, ssl stapling, and other things that can be tricky on other systems.

I miss the options to use all other very powerful products under the Apache umbrella.

It's super fast, really.

All prototyping for new sites is done with a simple Nginx boilerplate that is a breeze to install and use.

Easy and stable why if I configured then it will not give me headache and fast access to websites.

I don't know what I dislike maybe I should use more time to learn other sub function.

I can do any things with Nginx performance and stable.

Easy to configure, especially for our reverse proxy and load balancer needs. It worked seamlessly with our microservice architecture and had very simple setup.

None really. It worked well and it's fantastic that it's open source.

A lot of documentation can be found online. Web community heavily relies on nginx :)

serving our web app and handling our microservice architecture

Nginx helps save ressources by performing much better than other popular webservers. It is fairly easy to configure and set up and very flexible.

It is not easy to implement other modules without compiling

Have a look and try. You will most likeley like it.

Webserver with a reduced need for hardware to deliver good performance.

Nginx is a stable, fast HTTP web server/reverse proxy with many features.

It's one of those software components you can really trust.

Never had a single problem in years.

You should take care to the configuration files syntax

It's perfect as reverse proxy for Ruby on Rails applications and static sites hosting.

The ability to load balance mostly any web application in with very little effort. Adding new nodes with also very little effort, to protect from DDoS attacks.

Configuration could be simpler on initial setup.

Load balancing web applications that would crash on their own.

* Simple to configure

* Low overhead

* Open source

I can't really think of anything I dislike...

If you're looking for a light, high performance webserver that is a lot easier to configure than Apache (IMHO), this is it!

Trying to serve web pages.

Highly configurable, easy to setup on existing architecture, scales well, much faster than other solutions in market and one of the best load balancer

Dynamic module loading still needs improvement, Windows support is lacking

Using it as web server and load balancer on our production http services.

Nginx is easy to configure and very fast.

Not as popular as apache, so you may have some issues setting up projects when apache config files are referenced

Nginx is great for load balancing,. Individual web servers and reverse proxying

The increase in the efficiency of our application.

I haven't found anything until now and nothing will be found in future as well

We were looking for a simple and perfect load balancer. Also the redirections of urls to content based management systems

One of my favorite nginx´s features, besides peformance of course, is simplicity of configuration.

Less community support and documentation than othes related softwares (like Apache)

Currently nginx is my one-to-go web server solution for web server and proxying.

High Performance and easy configuration through console.

Compared to Apache there are not many third party managment tools.

Easy setup and hard customization.

High performance, low memory footprint, really fast at serving static files, and handling concurrent requests. It’s also very efficient, reliable, and easy to configure.

It won’t help you much in speed if you have a lot of dynamic content/code. It won’t be worse than the others, but you won’t see as big of a speed improvement.

It is gaining in popularity. Give it a try if your requirements meet its strengths (concurrency & fast static serving).