Top 15+ Web Servers List

Web Servers List. The web server is a piece of software that automates the web application and its web component execution i.e. it listens to client requests continuously 24*7. It takes the request, passes them to appropriate web components, executes them dynamically, gathers the result from them, and sends the results as responses to the browser. Let us see the web servers List.

Top 15+ Web Servers List:- Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Caddy, Cherokee HTTP Server, GlassFish, Internet Information Services, Jetty, Lighttpd, NGINX, LiteSpeed Web Server, Oracle WebLogic Server, Virtuoso Universal Server, Resin, WEBrick, Zope, AOLserver, Wakanda.

Web Servers List

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source web server that delivers web content through the internet. It is commonly referred to as Apache and after development, it quickly became the most popular HTTP client on the web. Apache is currently the most widely used web server. 

It was first released in 1995 – quickly conquered the market and became the world’s most popular web server. Nowadays, it still is in that market position but mostly for legacy reasons. It’s now developed and maintained by the Apache Foundation, under the Apache license.

It’s freeware, and compatible with Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Mac, and several other platforms. Generally, it comes pre-installed with all major Linux distributions, like Red Hat/Centos and Ubuntu.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat (called “Tomcat” for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. Tomcat provides a “pure Java” HTTP web server environment in which Java code can run. 

Apache Tomcat was initially developed by Sun Microsystems, and then it was transferred to the Apache Software Foundation in 1999. Now, it is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, released under the Apache License 2.0 license.

Caddy

It is an open-source web server written in the Go programming language.  It uses the Go standard library for its HTTP functionality and supports HTTPS natively. Caddy development began in December 2014, and the first version was released in April 2015.

Caddy supports various Web standards and is available as statically-compiled binaries for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and BSD operating systems on x86-64, IA-32, and ARM architectures.

Cherokee HTTP Server

Cherokee is an open-source cross-platform web server that runs on Linux, BSD variants, Solaris, OS X, and Windows. It is a lightweight, high-performance web server/reverse proxy licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Its goal is to be fast and fully functional yet still light. Major features of Cherokee include a graphical administration interface named Cherokee-admin, and a modular light-weight design.

During the last few years Cherokee has been adopted by numerous electronic device makes and IoT technology manufacturers. Some examples include GoPro action cameras and drones, Xiaomi action cameras, Digi International’s Internet of things kits, ATN Corporation’s high-end rifle scopes, Defender’s security cameras, etc.

Since Cherokee is Open Source Software and does not require manufacturers to license the code, there is no way to know how many companies are embedding Cherokee in their products.

GlassFish

GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems. Later Oracle corporation sponsored this project, and now lives at the Eclipse Foundation and is supported by Payara, Oracle and Red Hat. 

It is one of the most popular application servers used for the Java based web application. This allows developers to create enterprise applications that are portable, scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies.

Internet Information Services

The IIS stands for Internet Information Services, and it is also one of the top web server examples. IIS was given by the Microsoft Corporation in 1995. As is expected of a core Microsoft product, it only runs and is bundled on Windows operating systems and used to host your ASP.NET Web application. but it is free for use.

Most commonly, IIS is used to host ASP.NET web applications and static websites. It can also be used as an FTP server, host WCF services, and be extended to host web applications built on other platforms such as PHP. There are built-in authentication options such as Basic, ASP.NET, and Windows auth.

Jetty

Eclipse Jetty is a Java web server and Java Servlet container. While web servers are usually associated with serving documents to people, Jetty is now often used for machine-to-machine communications, usually within larger software frameworks. Jetty is developed as a free and open-source project as part of the Eclipse Foundation.

Lighttpd

Lighttpd (pronounced “lighty”) is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure, and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem – how to handle 10,000 connections in parallel on one server but has gained worldwide popularity. Its name is a portmanteau of “light” and “httpd”.

Internet routers, web cameras, and other small hardware use Lighttpd as their web server.  Lighttpd’s FastCGI can be configured to support PHP with opcode caches (like APC) properly and efficiently. Additionally, it has received attention from its popularity within the Python, Perl, Ruby, and Lua communities.

Lighttpd also supports WebDNA, the resilient in-memory database system designed to build database-driven websites. It is a popular web server for the Catalyst and Ruby on Rails web frameworks. Lighttpd does not support ISAPI.

NGINX

NGINX is a free, open-source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for email (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers. NGINX was developed by Igor Sysoev in 2002.

Nginx has grown in popularity since its release due to its light-weight resource utilization and its ability to scale easily on minimal hardware. Nginx excels at serving static content quickly and is designed to pass dynamic requests off to other software that is better suited for those purposes.

It was developed to handle hundreds of concurrent connections, delivering better performance. Meant to be a load-balanced web server for heavy applications. Also, it claims to be responsible for 66% of the busiest sites.

LiteSpeed Web Server

LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS), is a proprietary web server software. It is the 4th most popular web server, estimated to be used by 8.1% of websites as of December 2020. LSWS is developed by privately held LiteSpeed Technologies. The software uses the same configuration format as Apache HTTP Server and is compatible with most Apache features.

Oracle WebLogic Server

Oracle WebLogic Server is a Java EE application server currently developed by Oracle Corporation. Oracle acquired WebLogic Server when it purchased BEA Systems in 2008. Oracle WebLogic Server forms part of Oracle Fusion Middleware portfolio and supports Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL Enterprise, and other JDBC-compliant databases.

Virtuoso Universal Server

Virtuoso Universal Server is a middleware and database engine hybrid that combines the functionality of a traditional relational database management system (RDBMS), object-relational database (ORDBMS), virtual database, RDF, XML, free-text, web application server, and file server functionality in a single system.

Rather than have dedicated servers for each of the aforementioned functionality realms, Virtuoso is a “universal server”; it enables a single multithreaded server process that implements multiple protocols. The free and open-source edition of Virtuoso Universal Server is also known as OpenLink Virtuoso. The software has been developed by OpenLink Software with Kingsley Uyi Idehen and Orri Erling as the chief software architects.

Resin

Resin is a web server and Java application server from Caucho Technology. In addition to Resin (GPL), Resin Pro is available for enterprise and production environments with a license. Resin supports the Java EE standard as well as a mod_php/PHP-like engine called Quercus. 

Although a Java-based server, key pieces of Resin’s core networking are written in highly optimized C. Caucho states Java is the layer that allows Resin to be “full-featured” while C provides the speed. Resin, which was released in 1999, predates Apache Tomcat and is one of the most mature application servers and web servers.

WEBrick

WEBrick is a Ruby library providing simple HTTP web servers. WEBrick was primarily written by Masayoshi Takahashi and Yuuzou Gotou, with contributions from other developers via the open-source model of software development. It uses basic access authentication and digest access authentication for different kinds of servers that it can create – HTTP based server, HTTPS server, proxy server and virtual-host server.

Construction of several non-HTTP servers such as the Day Time Server which uses the Daytime Protocol rather than the HTTP is also facilitated by WEBrick. It is used by the Ruby on Rails and Padrino frameworks to test applications in a development environment as well as production mode for small loads. It is now a part of the Ruby standard library.

Zope

Zope is a family of free and open-source web application servers written in Python, and their associated online community. Zope stands for “Z Object Publishing Environment”, and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodology for the Web. Zope has been called a Python killer app, an application that helped put Python in the spotlight.

AOLserver

AOLserver is AOL’s open-source web server originally developed by NaviSoft under the name “NaviServer”, but changed names when AOL bought the company in 1995. AOLserver was the first HTTP server program to combine multithreading, a built-in scripting language, and the pooling of persistent database connections. It is written in C and Tcl. It is cross-platform.

Wakanda

Wakanda is a JavaScript platform to develop and run web or mobile apps. It is based on open standards technologies including AngularJS, Ionic, Node.js, and TypeScript, and is supported on Linux (deployment only), Microsoft Windows, and macOS.

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