Nginx is a free and open-source web server. It is designed to handle high-traffic websites, running on low-cost hardware. Nginx also uses less memory than Apache and can serve more requests per second. This makes it perfect for small business websites or personal blogs that have a large amount of traffic on them.
Nginx server features and Applications
Nginx is a free and open-source web server. It can be used as a reverse proxy server, load balancer, cache, and web accelerator. Nginx can be used to deliver static content quickly while also supporting dynamic applications.
The key ability of Nginx remains that it can work with several web users’ requests at the same time in the same process, while apache does not have this capacity thus consuming more memory.
The Nginx web server has a modular design that allows you to add features such as caching, load balancing, and proxying. Nginx is lightweight and efficient. It can handle large amounts of traffic without consuming much memory or CPU time.
Nginx is rather easier to configure from the get go
Nginx is free and open-source software. 
Nginx is free and open-source software. It is released under the terms of a 2 clause BSD license, which allows commercial use. Nginx runs on Unix, Linux, and Windows.
NGINX has the following features:
- A variety of protocols (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, Websocket)
- Load balancing to distribute requests among servers or groups of servers with similar characteristics
- Caching for static resources, and media files
- special use case: Development of your own CDN
It was originally developed for the Linux operating system, but it has been ported to FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows.
It can be used as a web server, mail proxy server, and reverse proxy. NGINX is known for its high performance and ability to handle large amounts of traffic. Nginx was developed in 2002 as a free alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Information Services.
Nginx Server: high performance and low memory usage.
Nginx is a high-performance, lightweight, and efficient web server. It has a very small memory footprint and can handle more than 10,000 connections per second, rendering it a very efficient web server for high-traffic websites.
It’s highly scalable, reliable, and secure under any load. It comes with many modules for various purposes like caching, load balancing or proxying to name just a few. You can install only the modules that you need to achieve exactly what you want from your server.
Nginx versus Apache – A comparison 
When it comes to web servers, Apache is still the most popular option. It’s been around for decades and has a large community of users behind it. While Nginx is more lightweight than Apache, you can run both on the same server without any problems.
Apache typically uses one thread per request, so if you have more than one request in flight at once (web browser requests), then your server will be using multiple threads. This means that Apache isn’t as efficient as Nginx when handling concurrent requests since each new connection requires a new thread to be created which adds overhead and latency on top of what could otherwise be handled by fewer threads within fewer processes.
Nginx uses fewer resources than Apache does and can handle more concurrent connections for the same memory usage footprint. However, if you don’t need many connections at once, Apache may still work just fine for your needs, bear in mind though that
Nginx harvests less memory footprint per request hence making it ideal for small or micro Web servers with limited memory
If you want to run multiple web servers on a single machine, then we would recommend using Apache with Nginx as a reverse proxy. This allows for both Nginx and Apache to be running at the same time without interfering with each other.
Nginx as Reverse Proxy server and Load Balancer
Nginx is also used as a reverse proxy server. A reverse proxy server is a web server that sits between the client and the origin server, like an intermediate layer. This is done to cache content, add security, and reduce network latency.
When you use Nginx as a Reverse Proxy Server, it acts as an intermediate layer between clients and back-end servers (e.g., Apache). The benefit of this approach is that it minimizes resource usage on both ends of communication while ensuring that all requests are handled by one single process which minimizes response times.
The biggest advantage of using Nginx as a reverse proxy server is that it can act as a load balancer. When you use Nginx as a reverse proxy server, requests can be distributed across multiple back-end servers based on their availability and capacity. This ensures that clients are served by the most suitable server while also ensuring high availability in case one of the servers goes down.
When you use Nginx as a reverse proxy server, it integrates well with other web servers like Apache and Lighttpd. This allows you to perform load balancing across multiple back-end servers while also ensuring that all requests are handled by one single process which minimizes response times.
Nginx: Working with secure socket layer – SSL
Nginx is a HTTP proxy server that sits in front of your application servers. It can be configured to terminate SSL connections, and then forward the requests it receives over plain HTTP to your backends. This allows you to have a single public IP address for all of your backend web servers, which makes it easier for clients (including browsers) to connect to them. In addition, if any of the backend servers are compromised or attacked by an attacker, this will not affect other backends.
The Nginx-SSL module is used with Nginx and provides advanced functionality for offloading SSL processing, allowing the backend servers to work on dynamic content and requests.
It is possible to configure Nginx as a proxy server, and then configure your backend servers to listen on different ports. This allows you to have multiple backend servers working together in one location, while only needing one public IP address.
Nginx for WordPress websites 
Nginx is a great choice for WordPress websites. It’s popular with developers, who use it as a web server or reverse proxy in front of static PHP-based applications like WordPress.
Nginx is designed to handle high concurrency and large volumes of traffic, making it an ideal solution for caching static content on your WordPress website.
Nginx also offers many advanced features that can help you optimize performance, including:
- The ability to serve cached content much faster than Apache.
- Faster page loads by serving static files from disk instead of the PHP process.
Nginx for dynamic content PHP websites
Nginx can proxy PHP requests with FastCGI (FCGI), which uses sockets to communicate between the web server and the application. FCGI is an alternative to CGI, where the entire process of execution is served by a single process rather than spawning new processes for each request.
FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) simplifies configuring Nginx as a web server. FPM also comes with many performance enhancements over PHP-CGI such as dynamic configuration changes ( php.ini updates), and more efficient management of worker processes.
Nginx for caching the static content
Nginx is a very fast web server and reverse proxy that can be used to cache the static content of your website. For example, if you have a blog on a WordPress website, then Nginx can cache all images, CSS files, and JavaScript in order to reduce the load time for each page request.
Nginx Security: Built-in Protection against denial of service attacks
Nginx has a small memory footprint. This means that it’s fast and efficient, using minimal resources to serve as much traffic as possible.
Nginx also has many security features. It can protect against denial of service attacks using built-in modules, like the Limit and Burst Protection Modules. These work by limiting the number of connections or requests per second, which helps mitigate potential attacks.
It can also protect against brute force attacks using the Nginx web server’s Protect module. This uses a default password to block certain IP addresses from accessing your website.
Nginx is also easy to configure and manage. It has a modular design, allowing you to add or remove features as needed without having to rebuild the server. It also has an extensive set of configuration options that let you tweak it for optimal performance on your server.
Regex for Nginx Server – Power rewrite features 
Nginx is a very powerful web server. It has many functions and features, but one of the most useful ones is its rewriting ability. For example, you can use Nginx to redirect a URL from one page to another without changing the .htaccess file on your server or modifying your website’s code at all. Some of the use cases are:
- Forwarding requests to new content on the same website
- Forwarding requests to new content on different websites
- Replacing some of the content on the existing website by new newer content, such as images
Conclusion
NGINX is a powerful and flexible web server that can be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and cache. It has a strong focus on performance, stability, a rich feature set, simple administration, and low resource usage.
NGINX powers several high-profile Internet sites such as Netflix, Dropbox, and DailyMotion.