NGINX is an open-source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. It started as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. In addition to HTTP server features, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for email (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and as a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers.
NGINX as a Web Server
The original goal behind NGINX was to create the fastest web server around, and maintaining this excellence remains the project’s primary objective. NGINX consistently outperforms Apache and other servers in benchmarks measuring web server performance. However, since the original release of NGINX, websites have evolved from simple HTML pages to dynamic, versatile content. NGINX has grown with this evolution and now supports all components of the modern web, including WebSocket, HTTP/2, gRPC, and streaming of multiple video formats (HDS, HLS, RTMP, and others).
Beyond the NGINX Web Server
Although NGINX gained its reputation as the fastest web server, its scalable core architecture has proven ideal for many web tasks beyond content delivery. Because it can handle high volumes of connections, NGINX is often used as a reverse proxy and load balancer to manage incoming traffic and distribute it to slower upstream servers, ranging from legacy database servers to microservices.
NGINX is also frequently placed between clients and a secondary web server to act as an SSL/TLS terminator or web accelerator. Acting as an intermediary, NGINX efficiently performs tasks that could slow down your web server, such as SSL/TLS handshakes or content compression and caching, thereby improving performance. Dynamic sites built with anything from Node.js to PHP commonly deploy NGINX as a content cache and reverse proxy to reduce load on application servers and make the most effective use of underlying hardware.
What Can NGINX and NGINX Plus Do for You?
NGINX Plus and NGINX are industry-leading web server and application delivery solutions used by high-traffic websites such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. More than 350 million websites worldwide rely on NGINX Plus and open-source NGINX to deliver their content quickly, reliably, and securely.
Designed for cloud-native software architectures, NGINX functions as an all-in-one load balancer, web server, API gateway, and reverse proxy, helping accelerate your IT infrastructure and application modernization efforts. NGINX Plus offers enterprise-grade capabilities that provide robust reliability and security.
NGINX is a multifunctional tool. With NGINX, you can use the same tool as your load balancer, reverse proxy, content cache, and web server, minimizing the number of tools and configurations your organization needs to maintain. NGINX provides extensive documentation, as well as a wide variety of eBooks, webinars, and videos to get you up to speed. NGINX Plus includes responsive customer support, so you can easily get help diagnosing any part of your stack using NGINX or NGINX Plus.
NGINX continues to evolve. Over the past decade, NGINX has been at the forefront of modern web development, pioneering everything from HTTP/2 to microservices support. As web application development and delivery continue to advance, NGINX Plus keeps adding features to provide seamless application delivery—from configuration support with a custom JavaScript framework for NGINX to dynamic module support. Using NGINX Plus helps you stay at the cutting edge of web performance.