With all that has been said and written about Nginx, we can safely say that it's not the most appropriate web server for web hosting companies that do shared hosting. The lack of .htaccess files renders it practically impossible to host websites that have their own server settings, among which are rewrite rules. While a replacement solution has been offered in the previous section, it's not optimal as it requires a configuration reload after each change; to crown it all, reloading is only possible if the entire configuration contains no error.

The consequence of this first issue is that you will have to relocate the rewrite rules. They will have to be placed directly in the server or location blocks of your virtual host, regardless of which file contains the virtual host configuration. With Apache, rewrite rules would be located somewhere such as /home/example.com/www/.htaccess; whereas, with Nginx, you will need to incorporate them in the virtual host configuration file (for example, /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf).