Top 5 web servers software from 2013

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What are web servers?

When people refer to web servers, they usually point to a computer hardware or software, in most cases they mean both. A web server is intended to be used to serve a website content and to host these websites. For instance, any website you visit, including this one, is being hosted by at least one web server. There are other usage for them, for instance to provide a downloading service or similar. In this particular article I thought of breaking down the top 5 web servers software from 2013 and see a trend about which ones are the most searchable on the internet.

Top 5 web servers software from 2013

#1 Apache HTTP Server

Commonly named Apache, this piece of software has been developed and maintained by an open community under the name of Apache Software Foundation and currently is the number one searched web server on the internet. I myself has not been surprised, I know the software and it is damn good, you can do almost anything you can think of with a web server. Currently however the latest dev versions appears to come directly in a binary format, not sure how this will help development, but we’ll live and see.

#2 Internet Information Services (IIS)

IIS has been developed since a long time now by Microsoft and has come a long way down now being one of the most used web server software on the internet. This is being developed by Microsoft since earlier version of Windows NT and has now been added to almost any windows professional OS’s and as well as to Windows Server OS. Truthfully, I’ve not really been a fan of Windows since numerous security reasons, however it is safe to say that the web server holds its ground on the internet holding the 2nd place on the most searchable web server on the internet.

#3 Nginx

Nginx holds the 3rd position in our little top list, I myself thought this would be the second one, but its not me to call this. Nginx can be used as web server (default usage) but this can also be used as a reverse proxy configuration or load balancer in front of another web server. As a matter of fact, we need to state that Cloudflare’s powered network is using nginx on all their load balancing servers to provide their free and business services. Nginx has been designed to serve a big amount of requests for certain websites with over 10,000 simultaneous requests, while keeping the memory usage as low as possible. It was designed from top to bottom to be a scalable web server.

#4 Litespeed

Litespeed comes at 4th place with the same number of searches as Lighttpd, despite the fact that it has been advertise a lot of time being faster than Apache and providing more and more horsepower while using less resources, I guess the price they need for a license does affect them a bit. Although people do not know that even if they have a server with 8 cores, they do not need license all cores to be able to fully utilize litespeed, more then this, hyper-threading is not even counted. So for instance if you have a dual quad core CPU with 8 cores, you would only need to license at least 1 CPU and leave the rest of the CPUs for php or mysql. Anyway, this is fully explained on their official site and still is falling a long way down it seems.

#5 Lighttpd

This software wasn’t sure if it should be last or 4th, since both Litespeed and Lighttpd have the same search trend, however I set it last since I personally heard of it rarely and only used it on a few VPS clients that were specifically requesting it on a VPS server. It was made for security, speed, compliance, and flexibility, all in one to make Lighttpd  It provides faster fastcgi processing and asynchronous IO usage which is great for large application with lots of writes / reads on local disks. However the code is a bit different than what we are used to with Apache, Nginx or Litespeed.

This information can be fully viewed in the below trend provided by Google (thank you). I’m pretty sure there are other web servers that could be added to this comparison and I know of a few, but the above are the most used currently and also google trends doesn’t allow me to add more to the chart.

web server trends

web server trends

Anyway, if you have any other preferences, do comment below and let all of us know.

 

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