Which web server (or bundle) is relevant in 2016?

Question

Nginx

Hello!
The legacy was a music file washer with impressive attendance. The architecture is nothing remarkable: a bunch of Apache and nginx, everything listens to sockets, memcached. As for the stuffing, everything is just as banal: the self-writing in PHP generates pages in raw HTML, takes direct links to files that are right there from the muscle, and gives them to users for downloading. Everything basically works (but actually why not?). I transfer it to my hardware, which I rent for myself. Everything is good with him: two cores, two gigabytes of RAM, this is definitely not a weak point. I wanted to know if the attendance continues to grow, what solutions are relevant in 2016 for huge loads with a margin? Well, except for clusters, of course, not Facebook after all. I want to implement everything now, in a calm atmosphere,
I have read a large number of articles, and I am already inclined to think that, in fact, Apache is needed only for .htaccess, which I personally have very unremarkable (directly the CNC itself, prohibiting direct access to some files and my own error pages), so it can be converted without problems for any server.
But the main problem of Google on this topic is that, for reasons I don't understand, all the articles are surprisingly old (the absolute record is 2008!), so I'm somehow afraid to trust them. Duck, in most articles they tend to link Apache and nginx, explaining this by the fact that it is faster than pure nginx. Yes, and in 90% of the manuals for setting up servers for housewives (again, very old ones) this scheme is offered. However, at the same time, there are some fairly recent articles on the same Habré (not earlier than 2014), which talk about the fact that with such a trash, when the server was just lying, they removed the bundle and rolled lighttpd instead. True, some after the fact still returned to pure nginx after that. However, this articleI just broke! Tell me, how does this lighttpd behave under high loads? Although, on the other hand, it appeared before nginx, which means that purely theoretically nginx does it, because why should Sysoev write it?))) I am also confused by the fact that there are very few projects on it, and then in many corporations only hang on it "some services". One of the well-known Wikipedias on it, but if only one resource hangs on it, this still doesn’t say anything, even if it’s Wikipedia. It's just one thing when powerful and highly loaded projects, hadups are there and all that, so it's quite difficult to change servers every day, so they upgrade ready-made solutions. But when there is an opportunity to put everything on a clean car - why not try it?
Everyone is talking about Caddy lately. Like everything is in it: both sockets, and FastCGI, and auto-SSL (they work through Let's Encrupt) and even a child will really figure out the configs. Has anyone come across? How is it? True, they say that it is only suitable for localhost so far. But it is obvious that for the localhost I have four cores, even if a clean Apache hangs, I don’t care.
In general, here) No, I'm just shocked! 2016 is in the yard, have they really come up with nothing normal in 10 years? In 2006, while studying at school, I already set a bunch, 10 years have passed, but the questions are still the same!

Answer 1

nginx + php-fpm unix socket.