Not relating to the Author's opinion, I would just like to know if there's a legitimate, competent competitor to Nginx apart from Apache? Just curious as I've already had a bad experience with monopolies in the past.
That said, if you're looking for a proxy/load balancer, HAProxy is most likely the absolute best you're going to find anywhere, ever...and the price is right ;)
Conveniently this would support the authors requirements of syslog feature.