Apache HTTP Server Alternatives

Our lightweight Apache alternative conserves resources without sacrificing performance, security, compatibility, or convenience. Double the maximum capacity of your current Apache servers with LiteSpeed Web Server's streamlined event-driven architecture, capable of handling thousands of concurrent clients with minimal memory consumption and CPU usage. Protect your servers with already familiar ModSecurity rules while also taking advantage of a host of built-in anti-DDoS features, such as bandwidth and connection throttling. Conserve capital by reducing the number of servers needed to support your growing hosting business or online application. Reduce complexity by eliminating the need for an HTTPS reverse proxy or additional 3rd party caching layers. LiteSpeed Web Server is compatible with all popular Apache features including its Rewrite Engine and ModSecurity, and can load Apache configuration files directly.

Gunicorn 'Green Unicorn' is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. It's a pre-fork worker model. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

H2O is a new generation HTTP server that provides a quicker response to users with less CPU utilization when compared to older generation of web servers. Designed from the ground up, the server takes full advantage of HTTP/2 features including prioritized content serving and server push, promising an outstanding experience to the visitors of your website. Full support for dependency and weight-based prioritization with server-side tweaks. Thanks to others, H2O is provided as a binary package on some environments. Therefore you may try to at first install the software using your favorite packaging system, and then resort to installing from source. Generally speaking, we believe that using LibreSSL is a better choice for running H2O, since LibreSSL not only is considered to be more secure than OpenSSL but also provides support for new ciphersuites.

OpenLiteSpeed is the Open Source edition of LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise. Both servers are actively developed and maintained by the same team, and are held to the same high-quality coding standard. OpenLiteSpeed contains all of the essential features found in LiteSpeed Enterprise, and represents our commitment to support the Open Source community. Event driven processes, less overhead, and enormous scalability. Keep your existing hardware. OpenLiteSpeed is mod_rewrite compatible, with no new syntax to learn. Continue to use your existing rewrite rules. Built-in full-page cache module is highly-customizable and efficient for an exceptional user experience. Automatically implement Google’s PageSpeed optimization system with the mod_pagespeed module. Install OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB and WordPress on various operating systems with just one click.

Monkey is a lightweight and powerful web server and development stack for Linux & OSX. It has been designed to be very scalable with low memory and CPU consumption, the perfect solution for embedded devices. Made for ARM, x86 and x64. Monkey is a lightweight and scalable Web Server. Originally made for Linux, it's also compatible with OSX. It have been designed with a strong focus on Embedded devices, therefore its scalable by nature having a low memory and CPU consumption, making it a real solution for high-end production servers too. Monkey is built and tested for different architectures such as ARM, x86 and x64. Monkey uses a hybrid mechanism composed by a fixed number of threads being each one capable to attend thousands of clients thanks to the event-driven model based in asynchronous sockets. The interaction between the scheduler and each worker thread is lock-free, avoiding race conditions and exposing a huge performance compared to other available options.

NGINX Open Source: The open source web server that powers more than 400 million websites. NGINX Plus is a software load balancer, web server, and content cache built on top of open source NGINX. Use NGINX Plus instead of your hardware load balancer and get the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure. Save more than 80% compared to hardware ADCs, without sacrificing performance or functionality. Deploy anywhere: public cloud, private cloud, bare metal, virtual machines, and containers. Save time by performing common tasks through the built‑in NGINX Plus API. From NetOps to DevOps, modern app teams need a self‑service, API‑driven platform that integrates easily into CI/CD workflows to accelerate app deployment – whether your app has a hybrid or microservices architecture – and makes app lifecycle management easier.

Since 2024 Jaisocx supports PHP over HTTP/3, intuitively switching among HTTP/1.1, h2 and h3 depending on negotiation with HTTP client. a) Unique feature is Charset detection of published text contents, and making browser showing correctly extended ascii chars like in German or French alphabets. b) It has built-in motor for securing endpoints with Basic Auth and JSON Web Token. c) Proxy Endpoints. d) Also the framework-like solution for publishing SQL queries results in JSON format out of the box with minimal configuration. e) On the same company site this software is well documented. f) Software is free, g) and has the Docker Hub repository h) and Github.com repository with some basic samples for Laravel, Symfony and WordPress apps under Docker Compose.

Hiawatha has been written with security in mind. This resulted in a highly secure webserver in both code and features. Hiawatha can stop SQL injections, XSS and CSRF attacks and exploit attempts. Via a specially crafted monitoring tool, you can keep track of all your webservers. You don't need to be a HTTP or CGI expert to get Hiawatha up and running. Its configuration syntax is easy to learn. The documentation and examples you can find on this website will give you all the information you need to configure your webserver within minutes. Although Hiawatha has everything a modern webserver needs, it's nevertheless a small and lightweight webserver. This makes Hiawatha ideal for older hardware or embedded systems. Special techniques are being used to keep the usage of resources as low as possible.

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user. Tornado is different from most Python web frameworks. It is not based on WSGI, and it is typically run with only one thread per process. While some support of WSGI is available in the tornado.wsgi module, it is not a focus of development and most applications should be written to use Tornado’s own interfaces (such as tornado.web) directly instead of using WSGI. In general, Tornado code is not thread-safe. Tornado is integrated with the standard library asyncio module and shares the same event loop (by default since Tornado 5.0). In general, libraries designed for use with asyncio can be mixed freely with Tornado.

Tengine is a web server originated by Taobao, the largest e-commerce website in Asia. It is based on the Nginx HTTP server and has many advanced features. Tengine has proven to be very stable and efficient on some of the top 100 websites in the world, including Taobao and tmall. Tengine has been an open source project since December 2011. It is being actively developed by the Tengine team, whose core members are from Taobao, Sogou and other internet companies. Tengine is a community effort and everyone is encouraged to get involved. All features of Nginx-1.17.3 are inherited, i.e., it is compatible with Nginx. Support the connect HTTP method for forward proxy. Enhanced operations monitoring, such as asynchronous log & rollback, DNS caching, memory usage, etc. Sends unbuffered upload directly to HTTP and FastCGI backend servers, which saves disk I/Os. More load balancing methods, e.g., consistent hashing, session persistence, upstream health check, etc.