nginx can do a ton of things with modules. One of the reasons I use it is because I can pattern match incoming URLs and send them to different servers based on

nginx can do a ton of things with modules. One of the reasons I use it is because I can pattern match incoming URLs and send them to different servers based on some pretty fancy rules routing rules. Also, there are many that use nginx as the load balancer (including me). Would a TCP load balancer be better? Possibly but it also comes at an additional cost whereas nginx is free and far more flexible with routing HTTP content. I'm not even going to summarize all the other things nginx can do via modules (Lua, memcached, etc -- http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules).