We added Nginx to our hosting environment in front of Apache and knew a bunch of other folks who did the same. The outwardly visible adoption of Nginx was not n

We added Nginx to our hosting environment in front of Apache and knew a bunch of other folks who did the same. The outwardly visible adoption of Nginx was not necessarily zero-sum with Apache’s footprint at first. In my case we scaled Drupal and Wordpress sites by using Varnish as a reverse proxy cache in front of Apache. But then we wanted to go HTTPS across the board, which Varnish does not handle. So we terminated HTTPS in Nginx and then passed the connection back to the existing Varnish/Apache stack. I know other folks just skipped or ripped out the Varnish layer and used Nginx for both HTTPS and caching. At the time both Drupal and Wordpress (and other popular PHP projects) depended on Apache-specific features for things like pretty URLs and even security. Over time, the community engineered away from those so there was little reason to prefer Apache anymore.