Comparison of web server software

Web server software allows computers to act as web servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications.

Some web application frameworks include simple HTTP servers. For example the Django framework provides runserver, and PHP has a built-in server. These are generally intended only for use during initial development. A production server will require a more robust HTTP front-end such as one of the servers listed here.

Some features may be intentionally not included to web server to avoid featuritis. For example:

• TLS/HTTPS may be enabled with a separate stunnel daemon that terminates TLS and redirects raw HTTP packets to http daemon.
• NGINX and OpenBSD httpd authors decided not to include CGI interpretation but instead use FastCGI. For OpenBSD was developed a slowcgi gateway.
• BusyBox httpd doesn't have automatically generated directory listing but it may be implemented as a CGI script

• Comparison of application servers
• Embedded HTTP server
• Gunicorn (HTTP server)
• Helicon Ape

• Netcraft Web Server Survey Archived 2010-05-20 at the Wayback Machine
• Usage Statistics and Market Share of Web Servers for Websites