As someone younger who never really used Apache, I don't see any reason to do anything with it instead of Nginx.
Other than supporting "legacy" setups, whats the point of Nginx load balancing Apache?
Configuring nginx is just so much more intuitive.
OTOH, Apache suffered from the "slow loris" attack, so the whole shebang ended up being nginx sitting in front of a few front-end apache instance kinds, which sit in front of a dozen or so backend apache instance kinds.
I find it interesting that although on those servers there are 12x more Apaches than NGINX, it might get counted as a server "using nginx"...
... and that's just because the whole she-bang sits under cloudflare, which reports Server: nginx-cloudflare ;)
While I imagine PHP is the single largest reason, other languages that support or expect the use of fastcgi are also very easy to configure with nginx, whereas I can count on one hand the number of businesses I've seen using Apache's mod_fcgid.
I don't believe cPanel/WHM even supports nginx yet as a standard option.
The below are links to benchmarks and discussions around mod_php vs. fpm. These are from last year 2016. Fast forward to today; I am seeing people move to php 7 and move back to mod_php. I believe we are at the start of a movement. Articles/stories will follow but only after the fact.
https://www.symfony.fi/entry/symfony-benchmarks-php-fpm-vs-p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/4bi9a4/why_is_mod_php_...
The fact is that Apache + mod_php will keep an instance of the PHP interpreter active in every single child httpd process. With nginx+fpm, your static assets are served directly from nginx without the overhead of an unnecessary PHP interpreter loaded into that process, while only your PHP requests are funneled to FPM. The performance overhead of having a PHP interpreter loaded into the process that is only serving a static asset is astronomical.
At the end of the day, benchmark your shippable product. Never try to benchmark a "Hello World" or a Wordpress installation if you're not shipping a Hello World or Wordpress codebase. Purely based off professional experience, I have never seen a real-world app perform better on Apache+mod_php than on nginx+fpm.
The only thing PHP 7 gave us was essentially the ability to ignore HHVM as a "required performance booster". 90% of companies were already able to ignore HHVM; with the improvements made to PHP 7, it's now 95-99%+ of products that don't need to evaluate HHVM as a mandatory alternative. And yes, nginx+fpm is still the defacto standard for PHP 7; the links you have provided do not say any different.
I also really doubt that php7.1 mod and apache without .htaccess is faster than nginx and php7.1-fpm under 'ondemand' mode. Even a 5$ DO server can handle hundreds of requests a second to big frameworks like Drupal or Mediawiki, and they're securely seperated. Locking down permissions on a group level to the executing php-pool, so you can then make only specific users belong to that pool and bind a directory in their home to the actual website location.
> if you want your webserver to do something complex, you'd go for Apache
I would tend to disagree. Assuming "complex" = "business logic", Apache hardly seems the right choice. PHP/Python/Node/GoLang or Lua right inside nginx would be more appropriate in most cases, imo.
> a set of simple rules that are within what Apache (including there all the module ecosystem) can and is designed to do
Most people do it because they have no idea what they are doing and they never decided on a naming convention for their apps and domains.
Especially links on sites you have no control over.
But we should also ask ourselves how to get into such messes less often. That is, how to systematically reduce the number of early-stage design errors. One trick is to choose tools that forbid known anti-patterns.
That means the designers must work harder up-front to figure out a system that can do without the work-arounds. But that is a feature, not a bug; indeed that is what our processes should try to achieve.
WebDAV support.