DigitalOcean Load Balancer vs NGINX

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

87
94
+ 1
0
NGINX

108.3K
56.4K
+ 1
5.5K
Add tool

DigitalOcean Load Balancer vs nginx: What are the differences?

DigitalOcean Load Balancer: Scale your applications and improve availability across your infrastructure in a few clicks. Load Balancers are a highly available, fully-managed service that work right out of the box and can be deployed as fast as a Droplet. Load Balancers distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure to increase your application's availability; nginx: A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet. nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer can be classified as a tool in the "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" category, while nginx is grouped under "Web Servers".

nginx is an open source tool with 9.11K GitHub stars and 3.44K GitHub forks. Here's a link to nginx's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, nginx has a broader approval, being mentioned in 8677 company stacks & 2561 developers stacks; compared to DigitalOcean Load Balancer, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

Advice on DigitalOcean Load Balancer and NGINX

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!

See more
Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 534.6K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.

See more
Needs advice
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
and
NGINXNGINX

From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."

See more
Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

See more
Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

See more
Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 508.5K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of DigitalOcean Load Balancer
Pros of NGINX
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 1.4K
      High-performance http server
    • 893
      Performance
    • 729
      Easy to configure
    • 607
      Open source
    • 530
      Load balancer
    • 288
      Scalability
    • 288
      Free
    • 225
      Web server
    • 175
      Simplicity
    • 136
      Easy setup
    • 30
      Content caching
    • 21
      Web Accelerator
    • 15
      Capability
    • 14
      Fast
    • 12
      High-latency
    • 12
      Predictability
    • 8
      Reverse Proxy
    • 7
      The best of them
    • 7
      Supports http/2
    • 5
      Great Community
    • 5
      Lots of Modules
    • 5
      Enterprise version
    • 4
      High perfomance proxy server
    • 3
      Reversy Proxy
    • 3
      Streaming media delivery
    • 3
      Streaming media
    • 3
      Embedded Lua scripting
    • 2
      GRPC-Web
    • 2
      Blash
    • 2
      Lightweight
    • 2
      Fast and easy to set up
    • 2
      Slim
    • 2
      saltstack
    • 1
      Virtual hosting
    • 1
      Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
    • 1
      Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
    • 1
      Ingress controller

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of DigitalOcean Load Balancer
    Cons of NGINX
    • 1
      No Let's Encrypt wildcard certificate support
    • 9
      Advanced features require subscription

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is DigitalOcean Load Balancer?

    Load Balancers are a highly available, fully-managed service that work right out of the box and can be deployed as fast as a Droplet. Load Balancers distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure to increase your application's availability.

    What is NGINX?

    nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    Jobs that mention DigitalOcean Load Balancer and NGINX as a desired skillset
    What companies use DigitalOcean Load Balancer?
    What companies use NGINX?
    See which teams inside your own company are using DigitalOcean Load Balancer or NGINX.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with DigitalOcean Load Balancer?
    What tools integrate with NGINX?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean Load Balancer and NGINX?
    HAProxy
    HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
    AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
    With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.
    Traefik
    A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.
    Envoy
    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
    Google Cloud Load Balancing
    You can scale your applications on Google Compute Engine from zero to full-throttle with it, with no pre-warming needed. You can distribute your load-balanced compute resources in single or multiple regions, close to your users and to meet your high availability requirements.
    See all alternatives