Best NGINX Web Hosting Providers (Top 10) December 2024

What are the Alternatives of NGINX?

• Microsoft IIS
• Apache

Before going in-depth about NGINX, let us see how well does it fare with the Web hosting types?

NGINX with Shared Hosting: 

When NGINX is deployed with a shared hosting server, there won’t be any significant difference. As we know, shared hosting is meant for websites with very low traffic, and NGINX is used to handle very huge traffic.

NGINX with VPS or Dedicated Hosting:

Unlike in Shared Hosting, NGINX can make a significant difference when it is deployed on VPS servers or Dedicated servers. Most of the time, you have to configure the dedicated server by yourself and that same goes with deploying NGINX. The hosting provider will give you the driver’s seat in terms of configuring your server.

But VPS will be the option that directly supports NGINX.

What is NGINX?

For most of us, pronouncing NGINX might have been as hard as understanding the concept of NGINX. Let’s break it down. NGINX is pronounced as Engine X. NGINX is an open-source software that was started as a web server designed for high performance, high concurrency, and low memory usage. And if we go in-depth, we can find out how useful NGINX actually is. It is useful and functional in not only in one way but in multiple ways. Be it web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming websites, and more. 

The Requirements of the NGINX Server:

NGINX runs on a variety of OS such as Linux, OS x, etc. And you will need to opt for VPS hosting or a dedicated server if you want to deploy NGINX as you rarely see shared hosting associated with NGINX users need to interact with NGINX directly for it to work. And shared hosting will make it possible only if every user has the root access which may lead to security issues. 

Why should you choose NGINX?

NGINX is an event-driven model as opposed to Apache, which follows the process-oriented approach. This makes NGINX more scalable and it will always handle high traffic with ease. 

NGINX is extremely useful when a server has to handle multiple requests at the same time. Most of the institutions or companies use NGINX where there will be a need for processing multiple applications at the same time.

NGINX is used by developers too since it is very easy on the resources.  More than 10000 requests can be handled by NGINX at a time by consuming very less RAM. 

NGINX as a Reverse Proxy:

NGINX also works as a reverse proxy server. The protocols that are supported by NGINX are HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP.  Through the reverse proxy, load balancing is achieved by distributing the requests and caching certain types of files.

Other uses of NGINX:

NGINX can track and geolocate users. NGINX also provides fault tolerance to the system. It is a great tool that can let users stream FLV and MP4 video files.

If you want to know more about NGINX, keep reading.

NGINX as a Web Server:

NGINX was created with the goal of creating the fastest web server. When it comes to benchmarks measuring the performance of the web servers like Apache and others, NGINX tops the chat with class-leading performance. When NGINX was initially launched, its job was to power the websites with simple HTML pages. But things have changed now. Now, most of the websites are dynamic and NGINX has not lagged behind. But it has grown along with the trend and supports all the components of the modern Web, including WebSocket, HTTP/2, etc.

Is NGINX useful as only a Web Server?

No. As we already saw, NGINX was initially created to be the fastest web server. But there are more sides to NGINX than just being a web server. Now it is used to serve many web-oriented tasks and it does it with the utmost ease. Because of its ability to handle a high volume of connections, NGINX is commonly used as a reverse proxy and load balancer in order to manage incoming traffic and distribute it to slower upstream servers.

That’s not all. Quite often, NGINX can be found between clients and a second web server, in order to serve as an SSL/TLS terminator or a web accelerator. NGINX efficiently handles tasks that might slow down your web server, such as negotiating SSL/TLS or compressing and caching content to improve performance. NGINX is often deployed in dynamic sites as a content cache and reverses proxy to reduce the load on application servers and make to make sure the hardware is most effectively used.