What Is NGINX? What to Know About NGINX Server

NGINX is a great solution that can handle many simultaneous connections at once, which is why it is so popular today. So what is NGINX, and how does it work? Read on to learn everything about web server NGINX really are.

What is NGINX?

NGINX is a powerful open-source web server that uses an event-driven architecture. For that reason it is much more powerful than Apache server. It also plays several other important roles, such as load balancing and HTTP caching. NGINX is used as a reverse proxy. Because NGINX is reliable, fast and highly scalable, it is used by many tech giants today, such as Google, WordPress, Netflix, Adobe and Cloudflare.

How does NGINX work?

NGINX works as follows: it uses an asynchronous, event-driven architecture. This means similar requests are managed within a single process, and each process contains smaller units called worker connections. A set of worker connections handles the threads that carry the requests of the worker process, and then sends them on to the master process. Finally, the master process is responsible for returning the results for those requests.

It may look simple, but each worker connection can handle up to 1,024 similar requests. This is one of NGINX's biggest strengths. As a result, it can handle thousands of different requests without any trouble. This is also why NGINX is widely trusted today for websites with heavy request loads, such as e-commerce, search engines and cloud storage.

Key features of NGINX

Web server and HTTP proxy features

Some of the main features of web server using NGINX and an HTTP proxy are:

• Can handle up to 10,000 simultaneous connections with very low memory usage.
• Can serve static files, index files and file indexing.
• Simple reverse proxy acceleration with caching.
• Simple load balancing with very good fault tolerance.
• Supports TLS/SSL encryption with SNI and OCSP through OpenSSL.
• Supports the FastCGI, SCGI and uWSGI protocols with caching
• Virtual servers based on IP address and name, with IPv6 compatibility.
• Supports WebSockets since 1.3.13, including acting as a reverse proxy and load balancing WebSocket applications.
• Easy upgrade of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, supports HTTP/2
• Supports embedded Perl code.

Mail proxy features

Supports these common authentication methods:

• TLS/SSL support
• STARTTLS support
• POP3, SMTP and IMAP proxy

Strengths of NGINX

NGINX is very popular and widely used today thanks to strengths such as:

• Compared with other servers, NGINX's biggest strength is a much better caching mechanism. This plays an important role in improving application performance when users visit the same address within a short period.
• NGINX is a lightweight web server that forwards user requests to the application server.
• NGINX's rewrite rules give more flexibility to configure permanent or temporary redirects for specific URLs.
• NGINX works best when it serves as the front-end proxy server for an application.
• NGINX is easy to customize and easy to distribute through HTTPS. This is because it has custom directories or upstream proxy servers.

How to install and check NGINX

How to install NGINX

To install NGINX from the prebuilt Debian package, just follow the instructions below:

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install nginx

Once the installation finishes, you can check that NGINX was installed by running the following command:

sudo nginx -v

nginx version: nginx/1.18.2

With just a few simple steps, the new web server is installed in the /etc/nginx/ directory. Open that directory and you will see many other folders and files. You only need to pay attention to the most important file, nginx.conf, and the sites-available folder.

Checking NGINX on a website

You can easily check whether your website runs NGINX by looking at the HTTP headers. Specifically, use the Network tab in Chrome DevTools. Here are the steps to check NGINX on a website:

• In Chrome, open the page you want to check
• At this step, press F12, or if that doesn't work, press Ctrl + Shift + I
• A Chrome DevTools window will then appear
• If you can't see the Network tab, click the ">>" icon to expand the tabs and then select Network.

NGINX vs Apache

Quite a few people confuse NGINX with Apache. But these are two entirely different things. Here are some points of comparison between NGINX and Apache that we want to share with readers:

• Operating system: What they share is that both NGINX and Apache can run on many operating systems that support Unix. However, compared with other platforms, NGINX's performance on Windows is not rated as good.
• Static web performance: In a benchmark running up to 1,000 simultaneous connections, NGINX was 2.5 times faster than Apache.
• Support and documentation: What they share is that both NGINX and Apache provide extensive documentation, covering almost every topic and required feature. This includes release notes, user guides, tutorials and more, and there is even a dedicated wiki.
• Security: What they share is that both Apache and NGINX take website security very seriously. Both servers regularly publish security reports and advisories, so security is strengthened at every level.
• Flexibility: Compared with NGINX, Apache is quite flexible and allows customization through the use of file .htaccess. NGINX, on the other hand, allows admin tasks to be delegated. Third-party admins and second-level admins can be blocked from accessing the main server.

That is all the information about what NGINX isand how NGINX works that we wanted to share with readers. We hope this overview of what NGINX is gave you useful information!

Security update, 22 Oct 2026: Two PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and 109619, affect PHP-FPM running behind NGINX. Patches and how to check