I’ve finished building my new server for this blog and have made the migration from Apache to Nginx. To a large degree Apache has worked very well for me, but over the last year there have been two occurrences where a spike of traffic overwhelmed Apache to the point where the server started thrashing and ultimately became unresponsive. Nginx should be better at dealing with spikes in traffic as it’s designed to be a very high performance HTTP server with minimal memory requirements. For PHP I decided to go with PHP-FPM.