Apache HTTPD, Serving the Web

The largest difference between your home computer and the computers hosting web sites is a piece of software called a server. Web servers act as a messenger between the internet and operating system and help control the flow of traffic in a secure and reliable fashion.

The Apache Group later grew into the Apache Software Foundation which is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation to: “provide a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure...”, “create an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit”, “provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects” and “protect the 'Apache' brand, as applied to its software products, from being abused by other organizations.”

Colloquially Apache refers to the Apache Web Server Project, or Apache HTTP Server Project, which represents the largest share of non-corporate web servers running today. We choose Apache for several reasons:
- Open Source: Using Open Source software reduces deployment costs by making available a range of low cost to no cost solutions to common problems.
- Configurable: Apache configuration is done with easily modified text files and, due to being Open Source, there is a wealth of information available for configuring a server to your needs.
- Security: Open Source means many people are constantly looking to update and enhance the core code, finding bugs and fixing them, preventing security issues and enhancing performance. The core team at Apache can review the changes and deploy them for anyone else to use.
- Portability: Apache can run on almost any operating system with minimal reconfiguration, compare this to a server like IIS which can only run on Windows.
- Performance: Apache incorporates the PHP interpreter into its environment while IIS uses the CGI model which is much less efficient; because of this Apache servers will routinely return pages faster than similarly configured IIS servers.