Documentation and support
The scoop with man pages and online help
From a basic installation, only Lighttpd and Apache had man page entries. Meanwhile, all five products tested had man pages online with the exception of Openlitespeed. Although man pages are a great of source of information, there is much better documentation online.
After spending quite some time on each vendor’s website during the first-time setup and running, Apache, Tomcat and Nginx seemed to have organised, easy-to-follow information that allowed for an easy installation, modifications and configurations.
Openlitespeed had multiple options and it took an amount of trial and error on both Ubuntu and Raspbian until it worked. Online it does look like a groomed commercial product with a slick GUI that integrated well with WordPress and other software, however it lacks the effort needed for a home web server and testing.
Lighttpd was another lacking web documentation from the source. Luckily, it is easy to setup and use so we avoided a wild goose chase. Finally, and luckily, we have Google to find additional solutions. In fact, we spent most of our time getting the solutions we needed to configure and make everything work perfectly.
With Nginx, Tomcat, Apache and Lighttpd, it seemed there was plenty of good forum questions and answers that could solve our problems. Openlitespeed, although it ranks quite highly for hosting usage on the web, it seemed to have the worst information and answers out there. It was almost as though our questions had no answers and there was very little involvement from home users with this server. VERDICT Apache 10/ 10 Tomcat 9/ 10 Nginx 10/10 Openlitespeed 5/ 10 Lighttpd 7/ 10 Nginx and Apache dominate, and online help is leaps beyond the competition.