Are you on a network with limited access? Is someone filtering your internet traffic, limiting your abilities? Well, if you have SSH access to any server, you can probably set up your own SOCKS5 proxy and tunnel all your traffic over SSH.

From that point on, what you do on your laptop/computer is sent encrypted to the SOCKS5 proxy (your SSH server) and that server sends the traffic to the outside. It’s an SSH tunnel on steroids through which you can easily pass HTTP and HTTPs traffic. And it isn’t even that hard. This guide is for Linux/Mac OSX users that have direct access to a terminal, but the same logic applies to PuTTy on Windows too.

Apache and Nginx are the two most common open source web servers in the world. Together, they are responsible for serving over 50% of traffic on the internet. Both solutions are capable of handling diverse workloads and working with other software to provide a complete web stack.

While Apache and Nginx share many qualities, they should not be thought of as entirely interchangeable. Each excels in its own way and it is important to understand the situations where you may need to reevaluate your web server of choice. This article will be devoted to a discussion of how each server stacks up in various areas.