Every day, millions of clients make requests for internet resources through World Wide Web simply www. This is done when a user enters an address on his web browser URL. It’s the role of the webserver to retrieve the requested resources and present them to the client. A web server can be hardware i.e a computer that stores web server software and website files e.g javascript, HTML, CSS, etc, or software to control how clients access the stored/hosted files. A web server uses HTTP and other protocols e.g SMTP, and FTP to respond to clients’ requests via www. The web server will thus display the website pages and contents to users. A web server stores, processes, and delivers web pages to clients. This is an example of the Client/Server model.
An HTTP server is accessed through the domain names of the website files it stores and it will retrieve the contents of the stored website files and deliver them to the client. If the requested resource by the client is not available, the web server will send back a 404 response. The diagram below is a simple illustration of how the web server works. The image is cited from the link.
A web server serves either Static or Dynamic pages. A static web server consists of computer hardware with HTTP server software. A static web server hosts files as-is your browser. A dynamic web server is a static server with additional software i.e an application server and a database. The application server updates the hosted file before sending the contents to the client’s browser through the HTTP server.
In our guide, we will analyze the top Web Server Hosting Applications for 2025. We will only analyze a few of the web servers in this article. The majority of the available web servers are open-source, the reason why their source code is available for download and distribution.
1. Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP server is very famous among many developers. Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server. It was developed and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation licensed under Apache License 2.0. Apache HTTP Server was initially released in 1995. since then, the Apache Server has gained lots of popularity and powers over 30% of websites.
The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project released version 2.4.62 of the Apache HTTP Server in July 2024, making it the latest release as of this writing. Apache HTTP Server is highly customizable due to its multiple available dynamic modules e.g mod_file_cache for caching purposes, mod_ftp for FTP uploads and downloads, and mod_ssl for SSL/TSL encryption mechanisms among other multiple modules. For core enhancements, new modules, and module enhancement, in version 2.4.xx please read Apache 2.4.xx features documentation. Apache HTTP Server supports auto-indexing, .htaccess, HTTP/2, session tracking, URL Rewriting, Gzip compression, and decompression
Apache HTTP Server supports Virtual Hosting, the ability to support multiple websites/domains on a single host. Apache HTTP Server supports both IP-based virtual hosts right out of the box and name-based virtual hosts (vhosts). In addition, Apache HTTP Server has a very useful module called mod_rewrite to modify incoming URL requests dynamically based on regular expression rules. This allows you to map arbitrary URLs onto your internal URL structure in any way you like. Read more on httpd.apache.org
2. Nginx Web Server
Nginx is a software-based free and open-source web server. It’s commonly used as a web server, reverse proxy, or application gateway. Nginx has gained lots of traction among developers and recently F5 Nginx Plus has been widely deployed in Enterprises. Nginx is also deployed as a load balancer for HTTP load balancing for web and application servers. As a web server, Nginx is used to serve static content, as a reverse proxy, for compression and decompression of server responses, and as an application gateway with uWSGI and Django.
The Nginx security is top-notch. It employs SSL termination to terminate HTTPS traffic from clients, relieving your upstream web and application servers of the computational load of SSL/TLS encryption. Additionally, it’s preferred because it is able to do SSL termination for TCP upstream servers. Another key security control feature is its ability to restrict access with HTTP basic authentication for IP address-based access control. Other security control features include its ability to do authentication based on subrequest results, limiting access to proxied HTTP resources, limiting access to geographical location, dynamic deny listing of IP addresses, and many more.
Nginx is highly available, supporting on-premises deployments. Furthermore, Nginx configurations can be synchronized in clusters. Nginx also supports runtime state sharing in clusters. It is also pretty easy to do content caching with Nginx. Caching both static and dynamic content from proxied web and application servers helps speed up the delivery response to clients reducing the server loads.
Nginx is also used to monitor the performance of your applications in real-time on the built-in live activity monitoring dashboard. More information like logging configurations, debugging for troubleshooting and bug fixing are also features associated with Nginx. For more details, please check the official Nginx documentation.
3. Lighttpd Web Server
Lighttpd is pronounced as lighty. Lighttpd is a lightweight, secure, fast, compliant yet very flexible web server. It’s designed to work in high-performance and mission-critical environments as it uses Memory and CPU very efficiently compared to other web servers. Lighttpd is free and open-source web server. Lighttpd can handle up to 10000 connections in parallel in a single server. Some features associated with Lighttpd include:-
- FastCGI
- CGI
- Basic and digest HTTP authentication.
- Output compression
- URL rewriting.
- Secure HTTP – Lighttpd supports TLS/SSL using
mod_openssl,mod_mbedtls,mod_wolfssl,mod_gnutls, ormod_nss - Auth
Read more on lighttpd.net
4. Microsoft IIS Server
IIS stands for Internet Information Server. IIS is a flexible and easy-to-use Microsoft-based web server used to host ASP.Net web applications. Microsoft IIS is installed on a Windows Server. Just like Apache, Microsoft-IIS is very modular which allows you to add or remove modules and extensions. Microsoft IIS has built-in security features and authentication mechanisms. Once the web application is developed in ASP.Net, it is deployed on an IIS server using either the File Copy method or via Web publish method. The key features associated with Microsoft IIS is its Module-based architecture, remote management, and Security and control. Microsoft IIS server is easy to deploy and manage. It is scalable with an open architecture to help in handling mission-critical and demanding tasks.
Microsoft IIS has powerful admin tools that include a CLI, an UI, and programmatic APIs. In addition, Microsoft IIS has rich diagnostic tools to easily help in identifying and fixing issues quickly and easily. Microsoft IIS not only supports ASP.NET but also supports PHP applications on the same server. As with other web servers, Microsoft IIS supports dynamic compression and caching of web pages to make the retrieval process very fast. If you have multiple web farms, you can manage them from a central place. Further, Microsoft IIS has integrated media platform capability to deliver high-fidelity experiences efficiently. See more features on the website.
5. Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat is an open-source implementation of Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages, Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta WebSocket, Jakarta Annotations, and Jakarta Authentication specifications. These specifications are part of the Jakarta EE platform. Apache Tomcat is used to power large and powerful mission-critical web applications. Apache Tomcat is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Apache is released under the Apache License version 2.
Apache Tomcat features include support for multiple environments, Multi-Application Support, and Open Standards Compliance. Also, Apache Tomcat has an intuitive admin console for easier management. It’s also able to give alerts and notifications and report/analysis of web applications.
As with other web servers, you can use Tomcat to configure virtual hosts, do load balance, for clustering/session replication, and for server monitoring and management. Tomcat provides support for WebSocket as well as logging. Another key feature is Tomcat’s ability to support CGI ( Common Gateway Interface ) this defines how Tomcat interacts with external content-generating programs. CGI can be deployed when using Tomcat as an HTTP server and require CGI support. The latest release as of this article is version 2.0.8 of Tomcat Native.
6. HAProxy Webserver
HAProxy is a free, fast, and reliable reverse proxy for HTTP and TCP that offers high availability, load balancing, and proxying for HTTP and TCP web applications. HAProxy is best suited for high-traffic websites like Twitter and Gthub and it has become a leading standard open-source load balancer. It’s by default shipped with most mainstream linux distributions and cloud platforms. Although HAProxy is open-source, an enterprise-grade product exists available through HAProxy Technologies, called HAProxy Enterprise that includes add-ons, support, and other professional services.
The HAProxy developers maintain multiple versions in parallel. HAProxy has an LTS of 5 years for every release. In addition, the HAProxy developers continuously provide fixes for bugs discovered in their current releases, being careful not to break anything. The stable releases are for skilled users who wish to leverage new upgrades to take full advantage of the new features. The stable releases are maintained for 12 – 18 months. Key features associated with HAProxy include:-
- HAProxy s very scalable – Its event-driven architecture makes it extremely quick to I/O events. Additionally, it’s able to handle multiple user requests over SSL
- HAProxy is exceptionally robust – Users rarely complain of crashes. It’s a very high-quality web server due to the amount of work put in by its dedicated developers.
- HAProxy has a 5-year long-term maintenance cycle. This guarantees Long Term Support for a particular version of a feature that pleases its users.
- To enhance security, HAProxy deploys defensive measures such as chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, checks for impossible states, detailed traces in case of violation detection, etc.
- HAProxy,s configuration supports environment variables.
- Log Forwarding – With HAProxy, it is possible to declare one or multiple log forwarding sections, then HAProxy will forward all the received log messages to a log servers list.
- Caching – HAProxy provides a cache designed to perform cache on small objects e.g favicon, CSS, etc. This cache is based on a memory area shared between all threads and split into 1kb blocks.
- HAProxy has a CLI for server management.
- Supports multithreading and URL rewriting.
- Supports Dynamic SSL certificate storage and HTTP authentication.
The list is not exhaustive, for more please check the HAProxy website.
7. Caddy Webserver
Caddy 2 is a powerful open-source enterprise-ready ultimate web server/proxy with automatic HTTPS. It is written in Golang language and it has a modular architecture. Caddy simplifies your infrastructure by combining multiple services into a single service for easier management. Caddy has become one of the developers’ top choices in the industry. This is because Caddy runs anywhere and ore so in containers because it doesn’t depend on any dependencies.
See the image below cited from caddyserver.com
Being an open-source web server, it is licensed with the Apache 2.0 open-source license. Some features associated with the Caddy webserver include the following:-
- Security – Caddy automatically obtains and renews TLS certificates for your websites. This is because it is the only web server that uses HTPPS automatically.
- Caddy offers greater memory safety than other servers because it is written in Go language.
- Caddy is both a file server and a proxy server. Hence can be used to serve static websites with compression as well as perform load balancing, circuit breaking, caching, etc.
- Caddy has a modular architecture.
- Caddy uses TLS automatically by default.
- Caddy has fewer moving parts which allows the developers to be more productive while reducing production-related issues. This has great cost/benefit analysis.
- Caddy has a standard Unix-like command line interface but configurations can be administered through the web via HTTP using a REST API.
- A good pick for enterprise-grade solutions.
Conclusion
That marks the end of my guide. There are numerous web servers available in the market. I did not list them in any order and the guide doesn’t give priority over the others. Other available options in the market include Cloudflare server, OpenResty, Jetty, LightSpeed web server, WampServer, Gunicorn, and so on. However, the most common web servers with lots of popularity are NGINX, Caddy, Microsoft IIS, Apache Tomcat, Lighttpd, and Apache Webserver.
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