Note: This article was originally published in 2013. Some steps, commands, or software versions may have changed. Check the current Apache Web Server documentation for the latest information.
Which Web Server to use: (http://https://httpd.apache.org/ “Apache HTTP Server”) vs (http://nginx.org/ “Nginx”)
If you are looking around there are a lot of people using NGINX over Apache nowadays. NGINX for what I have read provides a lot of performance improvements that a site with a lot of visitors could take advantage of. I found a great article about the pros and cons of each web server (http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Apache_vs_nginx) and I thought I could do a quick re-cap of the most important points:
Performance: NGINX
nginx is faster at serving static files and consumes much less memory for concurrent requests because Nginx is event-based it doesn’t need to spawn new processes or threads for each request, so its memory usage is very low Wordpress.com has found nginx to be the only load balancer able to handle 8000 live traffic requests per second.
Features: Apache
According to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_servers), Apache has the following extra features compared to nginx:
- digest access authentication
- CGI
- administrative console
- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.htaccess “.htaccess”)
So the decision at the end boils down to what is more important. If you love .htaccess then probably Apache is the way to go. If you are running a very popular web site then NGINX might be the way to go. You could always find workarounds, after all NGINX is very popular even among (http://wordpress.org “WordPress”) installations. There are converters to assist you in migrating over form an .htaccess environment like: http://winginx.com/htaccess
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