A Comparison of Popular Web Servers

So you wanna build your own server. Great! You've gotten the hardware put together, you've gotten your Linux distribution installed, and now it's time to choose what server software to use. Nowadays there are a plethora of options available when it comes to serving HTML to the world -- so let's take a look at the choices:

Apache is one of the most famous web servers out there. It powers a staggering number of sites, and is without a doubt the most popular open-source package. It's known for being both secure and flexible, a combination that's made it the choice of thousands of professional hosting companies. Unfortunately, the sheer flexibility of Apache is also its greatest weakness: it suffers from some performance problems, namely it doesn't hold up well under heavy load. That's not to say that you can't run a popular site with Apache (there are numerous high-volume sites that use) -- it'll just prevent you from getting the maximum bang for your hardware buck.

On the other end of the spectrum there's lighttpd. Lighttpd is, as the name implies, a light httpd. It's got fairly solid CGI support (for dynamic server-side languages, such as PHP), and is fairly flexible in terms of configuration (although slightly less so than Apache.) Where it really excels is speed: few things can serve static content as fast and with as few resources as lighttpd can (it's for this reason that YouTube uses thttpd throughout its content distribution network.) If you're trying to squeeze the absolute maximum out of a server, then you might want to consider using this daemon.