Proxy servers aren't just useful for load balancing. I'd say that this isn't the average use case for Internet-facing HTTP reverse proxies at all (people get al

Proxy servers aren't just useful for load balancing. I'd say that this isn't the average use case for Internet-facing HTTP reverse proxies at all (people get all worked up by the big boys, but that's not what most Internet applications are about). In most cases reverse proxies are useful as application firewalls, where you control what passes and what doesn't in an application-independent way (i.e. your systems administrators can do this without the need to touch applications - which in many enterprise settings can't be easily touched by developers, much less by operations). This is why I have yet to use nginx, and stay with good-old apache. Apache is extremely configurable (not only is mod_rewrite very powerful, but you can insert your own request mangling scripts for that weird edge case). Apache is also good enough for most cases. For applications with a few thousand users hanging on the site all day, apache can handle it just fine in a 5-year old, low-end Celeron rack server, with just 5% CPU usage even with all connections being SSL for both Internet and application server traffic. Caching and load-balancing are nice things to have, but not the reason for having a reverse proxy in most cases.