Its official, we’ve defected to the Russians.

I really like litespeed, mostly because it has a simple web interface to manage your virtual hosts, environments and all their settings. I’m seriously over a shell console and typing, programmers really need to get a clue about the power of interface design and a mouse…

Anyway, we did an minor upgrade to rails 2+ and some of our apps just wouldn’t start under litespeed anymore, but the mogrels were fine, so we decided to dump litespeed and run with nginx.

Scared of the install, setup, configs and options at first, I decided to make a night of it, I bought a case of redbull and Heineken and sat down ready be confronted with lots of issues to fix and a massive learning curve to get over.

Turns out I was finished in about 15 minutes – on my development environment, and in 10 minutes more my staging and productions servers we’re also up and running on nginx – with clustered mongrels.

So I put the redbulls back in the fridge and cracked open the Heinekens

Anyway, yeah, nginx is surprisingly simple to setup and use, it apparently can get complicated but I didn’t see any of that. Our local dev server was running in about 15 minutes with a 5 mongrel cluster, nginx is using next to nothing and its all running beautify, don’t know why I never used it in the first place… actually I do, because everywhere said it was a bitch to setup and use… litespeed was harder!

My verdict is to use nginx over just about anything else, I’ve used apache, litespeed, lighthttpd, and some others, nginx kicks all of them in every area.