Currently users cannot modify the NGINX configuration. Thus we had to ask for support to disable NGINX on certain directories in order to build an intranet site with WordPress. Otherwise NGINX would have served protected media files despite Apache's .htaccess rules.

Perhaps you could add a simple switch to the Cloudways admin UI to disable or enable NGINX for an app, the same way you can already disable/enable Varnish cache? That would have solved the problem in our case.

There is also a related suggestion to allow disabling NGINX for a specified directory, which would also have solved our problem:

https://cloudways.uservoice.com/forums/203824-service-improvement/suggestions/33655630-allow-nginx-to-work-in-all-but-specified-folders

My colleague noted that another provider we use allows NGINX to be disabled in certain directories by adding a file called "cache.disable" to that directory. Something like that would also work.