Commercial Open-Source Web Server Support Launched By NginX

Nginx, pronounced “Engine-X”, has announced commercial support options for companies using its open-source Web server in production.

This is the first commercial offering of NginX, which was founded in July 2011 and launched in October. The company is offering three technical-support packages – Essential, Advanced and Premium. The support packages cover installation, configuration, performance improvement, software maintenance, design, implementation and optimisation assistance. Consulting services are also available to assist customers in tailoring their custom configurations or adding further features and functionality, the company said.

Expert support

Intended for small, medium or large scale commercial Web installations, these offerings will be delivered by the original creators and developers of NginX, to provide guaranteed levels of technical support and consulting services in cases where the best efforts of free community support are not enough.

“These options were designed with NginX business users in mind,” said Andrey Alexeev, director of business development and marketing at NginX , in a statement. ”Whether you are using a single NginX instance or thousands of NginX-based Web servers for commercial applications, we now have direct vendor support to suit all levels of demand. We listen very carefully to our customers, and the commercial technical-support packages are designed to address their most common needs. Several enterprises have already subscribed, and in the future, we will be offering more services based on customer feedback.”

NginX offers rapid response and resolution of problems and incidents, including emergency bug fixes and prioritised development. Subscribing customers will also receive proactive notifications about major changes, security patches, new and interim software releases, and recommendations about available updates and upgrades. All packages can be supplied as either a 12- or three-month contract. Subscribers to the Advanced and Premium options receive design, implementation and optimisation assistance, as well as prioritised development. Premium subscribers will have access to an additional set of customisation options.

With enterprise adoption of the NginX Web server as one of the top-five open-source applications trending up, commercial customers can benefit from a service level agreement (SLA) based on support for NginX.

Last month, OpenLogic released a report on open-source projects that showed that NginX ranked as the third-fastest growing open-source project in 2011.

According to the OpenLogic report, the five projects that were fastest-growing or gained the most were, in ranking order: HBase, a distributed, column-oriented database system built on top of Hadoop; Node.js, a platform for writing highly scalable Internet applications in JavaScript; NginX, a high concurrency, low-memory-usage Web server and reverse proxy; Hadoop, a framework for distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers; and Ruby on Rails, a highly scalable Web application framework.

Meanwhile, Nginx officials said open-source community users will continue to have access to an extensive range of free support and advice from a variety of online resources, regarding the Web server. Documentation, knowledge base, mailing lists and forums that give insights on how to work with NginX, address bug fixes, obtain workarounds and build applications are being constantly improved, the company said. Users can also download and browse complete source code and binary packages from NginXWebsites, report and track bug fixes and more.