NGINX Load Balancing, Failover & TLS on a VPS

Using the tools of titans In our previous post, we built an L7 load balancer using Caddy reverse proxy. In this post, we'll migrate that configuration over to nginx so we can compare tradeoffs. But first, what is nginx? What is Nginx? NGINX, or nginx because I don't like screaming (pronounced engine-x, though some folks will say en-jinx), is a high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy commonly used for load balancing, TLS termination, and serving static content. Note: for the purposes of this guide, when nginx is written, it should be assumed it's nginx OSS and not nginx's enterprise offering, nginx Plus. Ensure that when reading docs about nginx, you are reading docs about nginx OSS, typically hosted at nginx.org Where Caddy optimizes for simplicity and automatic TLS, nginx exposes lower-level control over request routing, buffering, and upstream behavior. In our previous setup, Caddy handled reverse proxying and active health checks across two upstream nodes. In this migration,