[ag_47]

As someone younger who never really used Apache, I don't see any reason to do anything with it instead of Nginx. Other than supporting "legacy" setups, whats the point of Nginx load balancing Apache? Configuring nginx is just so much more intuitive.

[mfontani]

At $main_work, the reason is that there's a bunch of RewriteRules which last I checked simply couldn't be done by NGINX.

OTOH, Apache suffered from the "slow loris" attack, so the whole shebang ended up being nginx sitting in front of a few front-end apache instance kinds, which sit in front of a dozen or so backend apache instance kinds.

I find it interesting that although on those servers there are 12x more Apaches than NGINX, it might get counted as a server "using nginx"...

... and that's just because the whole she-bang sits under cloudflare, which reports Server: nginx-cloudflare ;)

[aluminussoma]

Apache can mitigate slowloris attacks through mod_requesttimeout. I recommend using this.

[pram]

Probably a lot of mod_* uses like PHP applications that haven't been migrated to php-fpm or something, and JBoss/Tomcat/Websphere/Weblogic websites. You of course can just proxy all of these things with nginx, but it's probably not worth it for most companies.

[developer2]

PHP is definitely a huge chunk of the reason why nginx has taken over Apache. php-fpm with nginx is the defacto standard, and PHP is far more prevalent than a lot of people think. Apache's mod_php(X) vs. nginx+php-fpm isn't even a debate. If someone is currently using Apache+mod_php, they probably have a smaller product that will eventually have to switch to nginx+fpm in order to scale.

While I imagine PHP is the single largest reason, other languages that support or expect the use of fastcgi are also very easy to configure with nginx, whereas I can count on one hand the number of businesses I've seen using Apache's mod_fcgid.

[smsm42]

nginx is much more simple than full-service servers like Apache. Which is good if you want to do something easy fast (like terminate TLS, proxy, load-balance, simple redirect, simple header munging, etc.). And not good if you want to do something more complex and get into learning how nginx rewrite rules really work (totally not obvious), how if and other predicates really work (multiple articles in docs suggest it's not obvious at all) and what limitations are needed to achieve the simplicity and quickness. So if you want your webserver to do something complex, you'd go for Apache. But may still put nginx in front for LB, static content, pre-cache TLS, etc.

[user5994461]

A good reason to use nginx (or better HAProxy), is to stop people from writing endless mess of redirect and rewrite rules.

[ag_47]

Fair point, but,

> if you want your webserver to do something complex, you'd go for Apache

I would tend to disagree. Assuming "complex" = "business logic", Apache hardly seems the right choice. PHP/Python/Node/GoLang or Lua right inside nginx would be more appropriate in most cases, imo.

[detaro]

Shared hosting setups where you want .htaccess support (or something comparable, but same basic issue: requires some additional layer to validate and generate a centralized nginx configuration, or some other extra layer, with Apache it is built in and well-documented).

WebDAV support.

[ag_47]

As far as htaccess support, from the couple Shared hosting providers I've used, lighttpd has been the server of choice.

[gcb0]

A: Features.