Nginx (pronounced “engine x”[8] /ˌɛndʒɪnˈɛks/ EN-jin-EKS, stylized as NGINX or nginx) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. -- Wikipedia

I first read about nginx from the one million checkbox’s website, but I’ve since had to work with it to trying to create my own website. It seems that the most common use case for it is as a “reverse proxy”.

Here’s an example of what a reverse proxy is. To everyone outside our server, it is the server, but it’s instead a front to route the request back to our real server. Why would you want to do this? If you have a lot of requests, then you can set it up to distribute the load between a lot of servers in the backend or seamlessly switch which servers are providing what service.