In this article, we will compare three of the most popular web servers available. We’ll examine their features and decide which is the best option for your needs.
What is Web Server?
A web server is an application that runs on a computer and responds to requests from the internet. Some of these servers are dedicated to serving websites or applications, while others can run multiple sites at once.
The first web server was created in 1990 by a group of graduate students from the University of Illinois. This server was the beginning of what we know as HTTP servers today.
What are the top Web Server Technologies?
Litespeed
The latest webserver to gain popularity is LiteSpeed. The first release of this technology was in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2010 that it became widely used. Currently, LiteSpeed has around 0% market share and is growing.
LiteSpeed was created by a Chinese engineer named Yong Wang. His goal was to create a web server that can outperform Apache and even Microsoft IIS, which he believed could be accomplished with the use of threads (his engineering background). He has stated that he has not succeeded yet in his goal, but LiteSpeed is still widely used. The architecture of the LiteSpeed Web Server is designed to make the system more efficient. It also allows for greater server performance and capacity.
If you are a web hosting company and you have 20 servers on which Apache is installed and running. Each server can host around 200 websites. That’s 4000 websites max you can host. Then you find Litespeed, who advertises that the capacity of the server will almost double to 8000, just by installing the application.
Nginx
Another popular web server is Nginx – pronounced as engine-x. It is released in 2004 and created by Igor Sysoev. Nginx was created with the goal to perform better than the Apache Web Server technology. Currently, around 32.5% of the market is using Nginx and is growing.
NGINX uses a combination of threads and event-driven asynchronous I/O. This makes it possible for the latter to handle tens of thousands of requests.
Nginx was the fastest growing web server. Out of box, it can serve static files while Apache has to be configured for this purpose. This makes Nginx more efficient in terms of memory consumption since it is able to handle many more requests per second, especially when serving dynamic content.
Apache
When it comes to LiteSpeed vs NGINX vs Apache, the most commonly used web server is Apache HTTP Server. Apache software was created by Rob McCool and Brian Behlendorf in 1995. Apache name came from ‘A patchy server’, it was based on some “hacky” software package, enabled to run it.
Additionally, Apache name was chosen to pay tribute to American nations experienced soldiers or fighters. These people were known for their war tactics. According to a study of W3Techs, Apache is used by around 36% of the market.
Apache’s dominance is no mere coincidence. Apache is preinstalled on most Linux distributions/Linux Operating Systems. As it is preinstalled it is easy to get up and running the server very easily.
Conclusion: How the success of your website is measured, the speed with which pages load for your customers. The response is very important. “Fast” is not just a buzzword here – it’s an actual measurement of how much the response time is between your server and client’s browser. LiteSpeed Web Server has great performance advantage over other webservers.
