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.

Nginx. This server is gaining popularity in the English speaking online community and it’s always been a serious competitor to Apache in RuNet (the Russian nickname for all the Internet pages written in their language). It’s used by one of the biggest search engines in the Runet, Rambler, and it performs at a very high level. It’s perfect for serving static pages, but it’s hard to get it to work with PHP/MySQL due to it not supporting fastCGI.

Cherokee. This is a very user-friendly, fast and flexible web server that also comes with it’s on web administration interface (useful if you hate tinkering with all those configuration files) and supports most of the widespread technologies like FastCGI, PHP, SSI, load balancing, virtual hosts, video streaming and others. It’s a great lightweight alternative for Apache because it’s like a more optimized version of it (even the log files are compatible with Apache).

Boa. Thousands of server admins say that Boa is the perfect choice if you want to get the most performance out of an old machine. It’s a single threaded (which, by the way, means it doesn’t create child processes for itself, just one main process handles all requests), very light web server that is ideal for people that don’t want to spend a lot of money on renting expensive servers. It’s also perfect for any VPS server.

Yet Another Web Server (or YAWS). This is a great multi-threaded web server written in Erlang, a language designed for performance and scalability for enterprise level applications. The documentation is very bad and you’ll have to customize the code yourself for the best results, but once it’s set up, few alternatives can come anywhere close to its performance: while Apache handled about 4000 concurrent connections, then died, YAWS went on to successfully work with more than 80,000 parallel connections, which is 20 times more than Apache! If you need a really powerful web server, have enough good hardware and can set up and customize it, YAWS has a high chance of being your final choice.

There are a lot of other good alternatives to Apache, but you should consider everything carefully when deciding whether you want to make the switch. Although some of these web servers are better suited for specific applications like high loads or better stability or performance, Apache is still the most popular web server available, which also means it has the most developers working on it and the most detailed documentation.

If you’re planning to switch completely to another web server, you’ll have to learn how to use it effectively, and lack of documentation can be a serious problem in this case. A good solution would be to just use Apache together with another web server for different purposes. Yes this is possible, and you can easily configure, for example, Lighttpd to handle all static file requests and Apache to serve the dynamic requests. Setting everything up is a bit harder, but once you learn how, it’ll be as easy as re-installing Linux .

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