People keep recommending Caddy. The config is cleaner, automatic HTTPS, three lines and you're done. They're not wrong. For a side project or a small team that doesn't want to think about infrastructure, Caddy is fine.
I still use NGINX. Here's why.
The setup that made it clear
Earlier this year I deployed a production system on a single VPS. Hostinger KVM2, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM. The kind of system that sits quiet for months and then gets hit hard in a short window, hundreds of concurrent users at the same moment.
The requirement was 1,000 requests per minute. I load tested to 2,500 requests per second. Zero errors. Zero timeouts. p99 on the result lookup was 308ms.
