It’s LEMP not LAMP!

I’m sure many of you have heard the term LAMP before – standing for Linux Apache Mysql and PHP.  This is a very typical setup for many open source websites.  It’s been around for ages.  But make way for LEMP.  In a recent report by w3techs, a new HTTP server is climbing its way up the ranks called nginx, but it is pronounced Engine-X; hence, the term LEMP – standing for Linux Engine-X (nginx) Mysql and PHP.

According to this w3techs report nginx is now used by almost 12.5% of the websites we know what web server they are running on.  More significantly a staggering 28.2% (of the 12.5%) websites rank in the top 1,000 worldwide (according to their Alexa ranking).

Along with my recent switch to Amazon EC2, I also decided to switch to a LEMP stack.  I thought I should throw out another shout out to HowToForge.com for this AMAZING step-by-step tutorial on installing a LEMP stack with extremely simple to follow instructions on my brand new Ubuntu 12 server.

Check out the step-by-step instructions to setting up your LEMP server.

I think I only had to make one modification to this instruction set before being able to perform one of the apt-get install commands I had to perform an update on the box.  Luckily enough, the OS told me exactly what to do!

A friend and former colleague introduced me to nginx a while back with his blog about Setting up WordPress with nginx and FastCGI.  This is quite useful for understanding the nginx configuration for a virtual host that requires rewrite rules as nginx currently has no support for .htaccess files!