2004-06-26 by 

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Almost 70% of sites on the internet are served by Apache, a completely Open Source, free web server. Quite an achievement for open source software, especially considering Microsoft's share is less than 20%

There are other web servers of course, which all provide various other features... I considered quite a few alternatives when building this new server, all of course are Open Source.

The Apache Servers
The biggest, and arguably still the best, web server is Apache which is now available in two variants - Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0, both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Apache 1.3
A long running, well established, and stable web server that is considered pretty much the standard now.

I have always used apache, for all of my previous sites and servers, and have now come to understand most of it's configuration very well. Also, Apache 1.3 is still considered the most stable platform for PHP, and it's VirtualHost support and the power of .htaccess files for site and even directory specific configuration make it an excellent server for shared hosting.

Apache is the default web server on most Linux distributions, Including my new distro of choice - Debian. This would make it wonderfully simple to install (i.e. do nothing, it's already there) and also I could simply copy across all the old config files and, in theory, they'll work.

On the downside, Apache 1.3 is now showing it's age, and is surely soon to be discontinued now that Apache 2.0 is stable. Therefore, I have decided not to continue to use Apache 1.3.X on my servers.

At present this server is running Apache 1.3, despite what's said above... explained later

Apache 2.0
Apache 2.0 complete rewrite of Apache, only recently considered stable enough for production use, destined to replace the Apache 1.3.X server through time.

At the time of writing, the latest version is 2.0.48, which is their 11th Public Release. I have found Apache 2.0 to be completely stable, even with PHP 4.3x, despite the various bugs that have been reported at times with that combination.

Obviously, having PHP is of the utmost importance to me, considering this whole site (and every other one i've built!) uses it.

Debian doesn't have a package yet for PHP for Apache 2, although Apache 2 itself is there.. I have found a third-party package that provides php4 as a module for Apache 2.0 in Debian, which works great!

Apache 2.0 uses completely different configuration files, which I must admit I prefer, which are close enough to the Apache 1.3 ones that it's not difficult to migrate or to learn to use the new configs.

I had decided to use Apache 2.0 as the primary web server on this server, but it's now changed back to 1.3.X... explained later!

Caudium (Roxen)
Caudium is a completely Open Source web server based on Roxen, with a few unique and very powerful features. I like this server, but it's very different from Apache, and indeed any other web server, It's mainly configured from a web interface, allowing virtual sites to be set up easily.

Where Caudium is truly unique is in it's modules. There are modules for almost everything including the nice tag which renders text graphically (as a PNG), there are also tags for generating 'business' graphics (charts, graphs etc...) and for image manipulation. The RXML markup even supports if / then / else statements and even SQL queries.

There is even a photo gallery modules which, with one tag, will look through a folder of images and generate clickable thumbnails and prev/next links. For rapid development of dynamic site (including nice headings, and tab-based navigation) there is no better platform, It's easy to learn, fast and powerful

However, Caudium cannot handle the same load as Apache, it isn't as efficient, particularly when it comes to running PHP within pages. And I don't want to be developing sites which require a specific web server, it seems to defeat the purpose of everything following standards, I can take this site and deploy it on any server so long as it supports PHP4, if I used the extra tags offered by Roxen/Caudium, this wouldn't be possible.

Caudium is installed on this server, mainly as a development environment which I also occasionally use for generating images, which I then save as static files and can include them in pages served by the standard Apache 2.0 server. It also enables me to host sites that require Caudium for others

thttpd
thttpd is used by several big names including Demon Internet and Global Internet, it's also used by mtv.com and a couple of the leading banner ad companies.

thttpd also includes a couple of unique features not found in any other web server (at least without extra modules) including URL-based Traffic Throttling.

Where thttpd really excels, is in it's speed and load it can take before slowing down or dropping connections. It's also incredibly efficient in it's use of system resources, which is always a good thing.

thttpd is only around 400k (as opposed to Apache which is nearer 6Mb) and has only 7,230 lines of source code. It is incredibly secure, fast, and can handle 720 requests per second (for small files) as opposed to around 300 with Apache. Additionally thttpd is considered very secure.

So why ain't I using it?, Firstly it's not ideal for PHP-based sites, Apache and even Caudium have much better support for PHP and are more flexible. Besides, the upstream on this server could never serve 1000 simultaneous connections, so although I can understand why Demon need something this scalable on their web servers, I dont.

Notes on Apache 2.0
I say above that I like, and use, Apache 2.0 yet this site uses Apache 1.3. Why? The aforementioned third-party module provides PHP support, but not MySQL support. I will not compile it myself, because it confuses Debian's package manager. So until Debian releases a php4 module for Apache 2 in the official sources, I'm sticking to 1.3...

I will, of course, move as soon as that module appears!

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