What is the best practice offloading to HTTP servers

Our F5 sits in the DMZ and we currently offloading to HTTP servers in the DMZ. We are looking at the possibility of removing the HTTP servers and sending traffic from the DMZ F5's to our internal network servers in order to remove that extra hop. I'm wondering what the best practice is here? I know the HTTP servers are running Apache so they probably have some security already built in that maybe the F5's wouldn't provide? Thoughts???