14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, Nginx has now rolled out a commercial version. The frugal web server has been growing fast for the past year in particular and its creator finally decided to build a company around it.
"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," the company explained.
Quite recently, it became the second most popular web server, passing Microsoft's IIS. It's still much smaller than Apache which dominates the market.
Still, the web server's popularity was in no small part due to the number of businesses and organizations that have adopted it for their purposes. So far though, those businesses have either been on their own or have had to rely on third-parties for support.
There is now an official support option, coming from the people that built and continue to develop Nginx.
There will be three support tiers, Essential, Advanced and Premium, each coming with their own perks and prices. Essential is $1,100, EUR829 per month, with a three month contract, and $12,000, EUR9,048 per year.
Premium starts at $6,600, EUR4,976 per month and $70,000, EUR52,784 per year but prices can grow depending on the size of the business.
With Essentials, businesses get web and email support and a 24 hours response time, 96 hours resolution guarantee. They can only have up to 10 servers.
Premium users get 4 hours response time and eight, 16 or 24 hours resolution time depending on the severity of the issue. They also get phone support and can ask for new features or help with implementation. Advanced users get something in between.