From Russia With Tech Support: Open Source NGINX Remakes Web Servers

Caleb Garling | Wired | February 9, 2012

The second most popular web server on the planet no longer comes from Microsoft. It comes from NGINX. And now, the tiny Russian outfit wants to actually make some money from its widely popular open source server software.

This week, the company announced that it’s now officially offering technical support and consulting services to businesses everywhere. In other words, if you sign a three- to 12-month contract, the company will help you install and configure the NGINX web server — a means of hosting websites — and when things go wrong, it help with that too. “The idea is to offer more predictable technical support — as opposed to the best-effort support from the open source community,” says Andrew Alexeev, the co-founder of NGINX (pronounced “Engine X”).

Alexeev tells Wired that the nine-person company is already serving a handful of paying customers but declined to name them. The company was incorporated in the summer of last year, and this is its first official commercial offering.