The Verdict
Web servers
Sites that rank web servers by popularity seem to mirror very closely the verdict we’ve arrived to testing these web servers, for home and dev use. Like everything in life, every server has their own strengths and weaknesses, but all of them are more than sufficient for our basic purposes, which is to build a development server at home with the option to still use it as our primary web host if we so choose.
If our primary objective is to be up and running with as little tweaking as possible, Apache is a top choice because it just works perfectly out of the box, after a few installation commands and without having to get under the hood–or no one ever got fired for choosing Apache!
Nginx is right behind Apache for simplicity, as long as we make a simple change to the .conf file to enable PHP to run. The extra time needed over Apache to do this is really just a minute or two at most. Thus, making it basically a tie, especiallyu so as Nginx also feels like a solid workhorse, and though absolute perforance isn’t critical for us, it clearly outpaces the rest. In addition, if we take web server popularity into account, some sources claim that Apache and Nginx account for over 80 per cent of the server market. Thus, this makes both promising for both at-home testing and syncing web files to a remote server in any environment.
Openlitespeed looks like a good choice for the web and seems to have a real commercial edge to it, even if you ignore that it already has a decent amount of the existing web-hosting share. Nevertheless, it was too far off the grid from Apache and Nginx and had a number of time sinkholes to set up and manage, from a home user’s or developer’s perspective.
Lighttpd is another tool that works well and runs along the same lines as Nginx and Apache. So, using it is a rather simpler experience in comparison to the other two “trailing” server options.
Tomcat is another great tool and is recommended for those that are on the JSP side of things. Like Apache, Tomcat just feels like a tried-and-trusted way of getting a job done without bugs or poor documentation. The take-away from this Roundup is that all five web servers here are mature, reliable tools more than capable of meeting every need.