For starters: Rails, PHP, and passthrough routing stacks like message handlers and anything that expects socket handling. It’s just not built for that, OR session management for such things if whatever it’s talking to isn’t doing so.

It seems like you think I’m talking smack about HAProxy, but you don’t understand it’s real origin or strengths and assume it can do anything.

It can’t. Neither can any of the other services I mentioned.

Chill out, kid.

HAProxy is not meant for complex routing or handling of endpoints. It’s a simple service for Load Balancing or proxying alone. All the others have better features otherwise.

I’ll be honest with you here, Nginx kind of ate httpd’s lunch 15 years ago, and with good reason.

It’s not that httpd is “bad”, or not useful, or anything like that. It’s that it’s not as efficient and fast.

The Apache DID try to address this awhile back, but it was too late. All the better features of nginx just kinda did httpd in IMO.

Apache is fine, it’s easy to learn, there’s a ton of docs around for it, but a massively diminished userbase, meaning less up to date information for new users to find in forums in the like.

It’s called a Reverse Proxy. The most popular options are going to be Nginx, Caddy, Traefik, Apache (kinda dated, but easy to manage), or HAProxy if you’re just doing containers.