Back in the days Apache was a goto solution if you wanted to have your content served over HTTP. And in fact it served it's purpose very well since 1995 and actually it still does a decent job if you have . All tutorials and posts were praising it but back than Internet was a very different place and didn't have so many users. At 2004 a new player joined the game to beat the limits that Apache has faced with concurrent connections.
For a long time I didn't have any high load issues and stayed away from NGINX. Even now I could do just fine with Apache, but after digging logic of configuring NGINX, I really fell in love š with how easy and convenient it is when you understand basic concept and get how to read docs.
If you're new to nginx I would recommend to start from this docs after you install nginx to your server:
ā Beginners Guide
āĀ Common Configuration Pitfalls
DigitalOcean has a great community with a lot of nginx tutorials probably already having an answer to your specific problem. Also they've got a nifty tool to generate a decent nginx config.
There is a good post on Rate Limiting that you should definitely put your mind around and play with it using Siege benchmarking tool which is also available for Windows.
And two more links that might be usefull to you:
ā My NGINX Configuration Templates
ā NGINX Configuration Snippets