5 Alternatives to the Popular Apache Web Server
Apache wan one of the first web servers and it’s currently the most popular one. The reasons are obvious: it’s free, open source, very stable, flexible and customizable, which fits the needs of 95% of all the webmasters online.
But there are alternatives for it, if you need even more performance or want a web server for a more specific application. Here are some of the best:
Lighttpd. This is the most popular alternative to Apache, used by sites like Youtube, SourceForge and Wikipedia, which handle a lot of traffic. Their choice wasn’t random: Lighttpd was designed to be lightweight and handle a lot of concurrent connections. It supports most technologies that Apache does (HTTP compression, fastCGI, SSL, etc.) while being able to handle 2-4 times more parallel connections when fully optimized.