Except that’s not what was happening. IIS came after Apache and played a catch up for a while. It almost surpassed Apache in 2007, but GFC happened and its popularity dropped rapidly. If not for GFC, there would be no Apache today.
I’ve got over 20 years of experience in the field. I’ve configured both of them as reverse proxies and web servers.
If Nginx is accepting connections on ports 80 and 443, terminating SSL, and responding to HTTP requests, that makes it a web server. Especially if it’s responding with static content.
Except that’s not what was happening. IIS came after Apache and played a catch up for a while. It almost surpassed Apache in 2007, but GFC happened and its popularity dropped rapidly. If not for GFC, there would be no Apache today.
Nginx also increased in popularity around that time, giving more competition to IIS. Most of the web stacks I’ve seen recently are running Nginx.
(I’m an HAProxy man myself.)
NGINX is rarely used as a web server, it’s usually used as a reverse proxy, cache and SSL terminator. Just like HAProxy, Varnish, etc.
How are we defining a web server? Because to me it’s “the thing listening on Port 80 or 443 that responds to HTTP requests.”
And, yes, I know they do more than that, but they also do those things quite a bit.
There’s a pretty clear distinction between a web server and a reverse proxy if you work in the field.
I’ve got over 20 years of experience in the field. I’ve configured both of them as reverse proxies and web servers.
If Nginx is accepting connections on ports 80 and 443, terminating SSL, and responding to HTTP requests, that makes it a web server. Especially if it’s responding with static content.
Oh my…