So, you went down the road of optimizing your web server and the Nginx was your choice. I did the same.

Installing “by the book” but after “make install” (or, in my case “checkinstall” as nginx’ makefile does not have the option for uninstall), all I could see was “403 Forbidden”. After checking default’s site folder(s) for hours and even granting 777, I have found that the problem was in access rights of the /usr/local where noone could execute it’s contents. I’m still not sure if Nginx install made this or my Ubuntu 10.04 64bit was installed with those, but the following line “healed” the server:

$ sudo chmod 711 /usr/local

And, voila! The Nginx default welcome page was there.