Glossary
Nginx
Nginx is a high-performance, event-driven web server and reverse proxy prized for handling many concurrent connections with low memory use.
Nginx (pronounced "engine-x") is a high-performance web server, reverse-proxy, and load-balancer. Its event-driven, asynchronous architecture handles thousands of simultaneous connections with modest memory.
Common roles
- Web server — serving static files extremely efficiently.
- Reverse proxy — sitting in front of application servers or
apache. - Load balancer — distributing traffic across backends.
- TLS terminator — handling
ssl-tlsandhttp-2.
Versus Apache
Where apache uses processes/threads per connection, Nginx uses an event loop, which scales better under high concurrency. It has no .htaccess equivalent — configuration is centralised.
Why it matters for hosting
Nginx is the front door for a huge share of busy sites and most cdn and load-balancer setups. Spotting it in the Server header signals an event-driven stack, where caching, gzip-brotli, and http-2/http-3 are typically configured at the server or proxy layer.
See also