Nginx Brief Introduction

Nginx is a HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server. Nginx is an Russia project which is originally designed for the 3rd busiest website in Russia – RamblerMedia.com. It has been running for more than five years on many other heavily loaded websites on the globe.

There's very few web hosts announced to use nginx for web server solution since it's not yet officially integrated into the most popular control panel softwares. However, many IT or web hosting companies are powered by nginx from backend for loading balance and security related setup. Nginx and Apache are golden partner for high performance and secure web server configuration.

Nginx official site: http://nginx.org

Best Nginx Hosting

There's no standard nginx web hosting plan under a hosting environment. What you really should look for is a good vps or dedicated server hosting provider. For easy and fast nginx service, A2hosting is the best choice by editorial reviews and experience. The company provides quick nginx setup for live production server purpose with strong tech support. No matter if you just want to use for development or business purpose, The a2 server can support your web requirements side by side.

The a2 company provides a installer for nginx quick setup. Customers don't have to deal with manual operation and worry about any misconfiguration. The a2 installer be able to configure lots of services automatically including control panel service such as ispConfig and zpanel etc.

Besides this unbeatable feature, a2 hosting provides very scalable server solutions to meet with your different hosting requirements. Your server specs can be upgraded/downgraded easily with no data loss. The VPS provides multi choice for server OS, DC locations and other crucial server setups.

Why Nginx Hosting?

Being one of the most reputable web server softwares, Nginx is well known for many sides comparison among competitors.

1. Light weight – Nginx has pretty small size like the most popular web server software apache. Besides the small size, nginx is very user friendly with the configurations, it has less configuration files and all other stuff.
2. High performance – Nginx is developed to deal with heavy traffic websites that consume lots of server resources. When you got a such site, nginx is simply the only choice comparing to all other solutions.
3. Stable – Nginx is approved to be stable and reliable web server after several years' live server deployment. With loading balance support as well as proxy support, you can keep your server in healthy state professinoally. Especially when you're running an busy E-commerce website, such features will keep your business always online!
4. Open source – Nginx is open sourced and compatible with most modern OS including windows and linux. Downloads/docs are all available from official sites in multiple languages.

From a survey, Nginx is used by over 25% of the top 10,000 busiest sites, including Netflix, Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress, as well as by over 12% of the entire Internet web sites population. They're either used directly for web server solution or load balancer.

If you're considering to use nginx, there's a good installation guidance for CentOS server. Check out this rackspace page for details.

What would be the weakness of Nginx?

The only disadvantage with nginx is it's still not deployed into the most popular hosting control panel such as cpanel thus it's still mainly running on vps and dedicated server. If you like to get nginx running under cpanel or such you will have to debug yourself, there's no official support available yet. I think this is why nginx still not accepted by most hosting providers.

There's a cpanel plugin for Nginx called "nginxcp" which is dedicated for nginx and cpanel integration. From user experience, it's approved to work perfect but there's still some work to be done in order to have it running on hosting server.