What is NGINX, and What Does it Do?

A web server, a fundamental component of the internet, plays the critical role of delivering requested webpages. Typically, each web server possesses an IP address and a domain name. To transform your server into a web server, the installation of web server software like NGINX or Apache is imperative.

This article aims to provide insights into NGINX, distinguishing it from other web servers. Furthermore, it elucidates the purposes for which NGINX is employed and guides you on harnessing NGINX’s capabilities to enhance your website’s performance and security.

What is NGINX?

NGINX, a renowned open source web server software, functions as a versatile tool for reverse proxy, load balancing, and caching. Its core focus is on delivering superior performance and unwavering stability. Beyond its web server duties, NGINX also operates as a proxy server for email protocols like IMAP, POP3, and SMTP.

What is NGINX Used For?

NGINX serves a multitude of purposes, some of which are outlined below:

1. Performance: In the realm of WordPress hosting, NGINX can outshine Apache, providing enhanced performance for hosting websites.
2. Security: NGINX serves as a central gateway for users to access services within a containerized environment. It efficiently manages load balancing and routes traffic via a reliable public IP address. Users’ requests are received by the server, which then forwards them to the appropriate container, bolstering security.
3. DDoS Attack Mitigation: Dealing with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be challenging. NGINX excels in handling a substantial volume of incoming HTTP requests and traffic, ensuring application security even under heavy loads. It employs common cache responses and efficient request delivery while regulating traffic to prevent overloading vulnerable APIs and URLs. This is achieved by setting concurrency limits and queueing requests to prevent server overload.
4. Caching: NGINX offers both static and dynamic content caching, contributing to improved performance. This entails directing each data request to the microservice responsible for generating it. Microcaching briefly caches data, alleviating the load on the backend infrastructure.
5. Scalability and Fault Tolerance: NGINX enables the scaling of the backend infrastructure, ensuring that the addition or removal of any microservice doesn’t impact the user experience. It intelligently directs traffic away from failed instances until they recover. Deploying additional microservices merely requires informing the server of the new instance added to the load-balanced pool.
6. Downtime Prevention: NGINX plays a pivotal role in maintaining the seamless operation of web servers. This ensures that system software updates or upgrades can be executed without causing application downtime.

How is NGINX Different From Other Web Servers?

NGINX boasts a single-threaded architecture, allowing it to efficiently process multiple client requests. Apache, on the other hand, generates a distinct process for each request, contingent on the multi-processing module (MPM) in use, with the Event MPM being the most common choice. Apache Tomcat, employed for Java servlets, limits processing to a single connection per thread.

NGINX excels in rapid handling of static content, surpassing both Apache and Apache Tomcat in this regard. While NGINX delegates the processing of dynamic content to external processes, Apache can natively manage dynamic content within the web server. Apache Tomcat, while proficient with Java servlets, lags behind NGINX in handling static content efficiently.

Additionally, NGINX exhibits superior security with a more compact codebase in comparison to other web servers.

Notably, NGINX is versatile, functioning as both a web server and a reverse proxy server, while Apache is primarily tailored for web serving purposes. Meanwhile, Apache Tomcat serves as an HTTP web server designed to handle Java servlets.

When assessing performance, NGINX outperforms Apache and Apache Tomcat by adeptly managing multiple concurrent client requests with minimal hardware resource utilization. Apache, when faced with heavy web traffic, can only handle a limited number of requests at a time. Apache Tomcat manages requests through multiple CPU request management but lacks the capability to process multiple requests simultaneously.

Why is NGINX a Popular Choice for Web Hosting Providers?

Web Hosting Providers favor NGINX for its remarkable responsiveness and efficient resource utilization. Its ability to scale seamlessly, even on modest hardware, while maintaining a low resource footprint is a testament to its enduring popularity. NGINX excels at swiftly and seamlessly delivering static content, effectively routing dynamic requests to the appropriate software. Its appeal is further heightened by the capacity to handle traffic growth and scale effectively on cost-effective hardware.

NGINX shines as a load balancer, enhancing server availability and resource efficiency. Additionally, it serves as an adept reverse proxy, ensuring smooth traffic flow between servers and clients, underscoring its versatility in optimizing web hosting services.

 

NGINX Features

The following are some of NGINX’s features:

• Reverse proxy with caching.
• Load balancing.
• Mail Proxy Server.
• Static file management, index file management, and auto-indexing.
• Support for FastCGI with caching.
• URL rewriting and redirection.
• WebSockets.
• TLS/SSL with SNI.
• IPv6.

What Makes NGINX a Good Choice For Website Owners?

NGINX stands out as a top choice for website owners due to its superior performance, stability, and scalability compared to other web servers. Its ability to efficiently handle a high volume of concurrent requests makes it an excellent option. Notably, a significant proportion of the world’s most popular websites rely on NGINX for their operations. Hosting companies widely adopt NGINX to offer customers dependable and speedy hosting services, thereby empowering website owners to expand into new markets.

 

How Can You Use NGINX to Improve Your Website’s Performance and Security?

NGINX is renowned for its speed, but there are methods to further enhance its performance. By fine-tuning specific settings, you can transform NGINX into an even more efficient web server capable of managing substantial traffic loads while conserving resources. While NGINX inherently possesses stability and security features, the extent of its security hinges on the user’s configurations. After installing NGINX, it’s advisable to configure the server with simplicity in mind. This section offers security measures that can be employed to elevate both the performance and security of your website.

 

Enable Gzip Compression

Website speed test tools often suggest prioritizing Gzip compression as a way to accelerate your site’s performance. Gzip compression reduces the size of web browser requests by compressing files, leading to faster resource transfers from the server to the browser. This approach optimizes network resources, expedites page loading on slower connections, and can reduce file sizes by as much as 70%. NGINX can be configured to selectively apply compression only to larger files, bypassing smaller ones. To enable Gzip compression in NGINX, include the following directives in your NGINX configuration file.

Enable HTTP/2 Support

NGINX is initially configured to use the HTTP/1 protocol, but HTTP/2 brings several enhancements over HTTP/1. These include concurrent file downloads by web browsers and server resource push capabilities. Due to its superior performance, HTTP/2 is widely adopted. To boost the speed of your NGINX website, consider enabling it. Keep in mind that HTTP/2 is mostly supported over HTTPS, so ensure your server is configured with HTTPS before enabling HTTP/2 in NGINX.

To enable HTTP/2 in NGINX, simply add the following line to your NGINX configuration file.

Configure Worker Processes

NGINX is configured with one or more worker processes, each capable of managing multiple connections concurrently. By default, NGINX’s configuration sets the worker process value to auto. However, it’s recommended to choose one worker process for each CPU core. Increasing the number of worker processes can enhance your website’s speed, particularly when dealing with multiple simultaneous visitors.

A word of caution:
This recommendation is particularly relevant for servers that need to handle numerous concurrent visitors. It’s important not to set this limit excessively high to ensure that NGINX doesn’t attempt to process more requests than the hardware can handle.

You can configure the worker process in your NGINX configuration file by adding the following line.

Configure Worker Connections

The value of Worker Connections is set to 768 by default. It is advised to set this value to 1024, the number of open file descriptors. Add the line below to your NGINX configuration file to configure the worker connections.

Implement SSL Certificate

The most crucial step in enhancing your NGINX server’s security is adding a protection layer using an SSL certificate. It forces your website to use the secure HTTPS protocol over HTTP, which transmits traffic in plain text. You can use the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate or any other certificate that meets your needs.

 

Disable Weak SSL/TLS Protocols

While using SSL is a positive step, it’s important to note that it doesn’t automatically guarantee your website’s security. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are two deprecated SSL versions that are considered weak and are vulnerable to several security issues, including TLS, BEAST, POODLE, and CRIME SSL vulnerabilities. It’s worth mentioning that these deprecated versions are not supported by major web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

To enhance your security, it’s advisable to implement TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. To do this, you should remove TLS 1 and TLS 1.1 from the `ssl_protocols` line and include TLS 1.3 in the `ssl_protocols` line within your Main NGINX configuration file located at `/etc/nginx/nginx.conf`. Additionally, you should update your block configuration file found in the directory `/etc/nginx/sites-available/`. This adjustment will help ensure that your NGINX server employs more robust and secure protocols for data transmission.

Disable Weak Cipher Suites

As a security measure, it’s essential to allow only strong cipher suites, as weak ones can create vulnerabilities. To disable weak cipher suites, you should add the following line to the server block in the `ssl.conf` file. This will help strengthen the security of your NGINX server.

Configure Security Headers

Enhancing your server’s security includes configuring security headers in the server response. These HTTP security headers provide an additional layer of protection against intrusions and vulnerabilities, contributing to a more secure NGINX setup. They instruct the browser on how to handle website content, bolstering your server’s defenses.

Conclusion

In conclusion, NGINX stands as a favored choice among hosting providers for its efficiency. It’s engineered to handle numerous simultaneous requests, resulting in faster loading times compared to many other web servers. What sets NGINX apart is its ability to achieve this with minimal hardware and resource consumption, making it a cost-effective solution.

If you’re interested in NGINX and need hosting services, Cloudfrik offers VPS Hosting, Cloud Dedicated Servers, and Dedicated Servers with cPanel. You can conveniently install NGINX via cPanel EA NGINX on your Linux server with cPanel. Additionally, Cloudfrik provides full management for cPanel servers. Feel free to contact our sales team to set up your server today.