# nginx

130 Hacker News commenters recommended nginx and 44 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 15 years (5 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A proven, fast web server and reverse proxy with a huge knowledge base, trusted for decades of production traffic; critics cite manual configuration, sparse docs and surprising defaults.

## Why people recommend it

- Reliable reverse proxy (7 comments): "Set proxy_pass_request_headers off, and then explicitly proxy_set_header each individual header you want to forward" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952659)) "If you're using nginx/apache/literally anything that does reverse proxying correctly, this shouldn't be a problem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291250)) "Combine with a $5 VPS and nginix reverse proxy to make this true for any device, even ones without tailscale!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762164))
- High performance and scalability (5 comments): "NGINX uses async io to handle requests, which is a substantial upgrade from Apache; that's why it's performant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143096)) "nginx walked into the chat and killed the 10k problem along with having its easy but fancy upstreaming" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960483)) "i would expect this to comfortably be served by a couple of reasonable old school ngnix servers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279981))
- Battle-tested over decades (6 comments): "I can rely on gifts to the world like Linux, Debian, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Caddy, and Yggdrasil without any problems for decades." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026936)) "Up until the last couple of years from early-ish 2012, I used nginx for production traffic in a lot of places." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261803)) "there is also a reason why large organizations like Cloudflare ran nginx on their edge over any other product" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573586))
- Easy static file serving (4 comments): "Just install nginx from your repos on your desktop, throw in some .html files to a directory and play." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799187)) "a performant web server like nginx for example that is pre configured to serve static files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210663)) "make sure all static assets are served by nginx, add appropriate Cache Control headers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058052))

## What people warn about

- Too much manual configuration (3 comments): "nginx and the more standard webservers/services oftentimes don't have good support and require quite frankly too much manual configuration" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154489)) "I just wish nginx / caddy / etc had better out-of-the-box support for letsencrypt" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211054)) "the official documentation is almost useless, there seem to be many hidden surprises" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126077))
- Surprising defaults like slash normalization (3 comments): "Its defaults assume that it's fine to do a "normalization" pass to remove double slash" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814973)) "I couldn't get the web server to not convert it to a / before hitting my code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293678)) "the official documentation is almost useless, there seem to be many hidden surprises" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126077))
- Buffering and connection issues (3 comments): "between nginx buffering and cloudflare I have not been able to sort out getting it to actually work these days" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45856010)) "We didn't use nginx because it would drop requests and mess up connections during certain config reloads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937763)) "I've had issues with nginx still getting IO errors when my server doesn't consume bodies" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091884))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Caddy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/caddy.md): 114 recommend
- [FrankenPHP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/frankenphp.md): 15 recommend
- [Redbean](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redbean.md): 9 recommend
- [Kestrel web server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kestrel.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "nginx", https://hackerapproved.com/p/nginx/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).