I don't want to derail too much but this is interesting, because I recently had the opposite experience.
I hadn't spun up a webserver other than Kestrel for a long time, and was absolutely looking for the easiest solution for putting a reverse proxy in front of an API. No huge traffic requirements or low latency, seemed a perfect fit for caddy.
Then I googled to make sure that the necessary featureset was there and saw that rate limiting is a plugin that's marked WIP. What's more, there seemed to be a couple to choose from.
So I went through the certbot steps (very quick + straightforward) and wrote the short nginx config based on one page of getting started docs and was up and running.
Since you mention Kestrel I'll assume .NET so I suggest you take a look at yarp. It's fully programmable and "plugins" are just small pieces of middleware, a lot of which is available as a nuget package.
I hadn't spun up a webserver other than Kestrel for a long time, and was absolutely looking for the easiest solution for putting a reverse proxy in front of an API. No huge traffic requirements or low latency, seemed a perfect fit for caddy.
Then I googled to make sure that the necessary featureset was there and saw that rate limiting is a plugin that's marked WIP. What's more, there seemed to be a couple to choose from.
So I went through the certbot steps (very quick + straightforward) and wrote the short nginx config based on one page of getting started docs and was up and running.