quark
The goal of this project is to do one thing and do it well, namely serving static web directories and doing that right. Most other solutions either are too complex (CGI support, dependencies on external libraries, etc.) or lack features you expect (TLS, virtual hosts, partial content, not modified since, etc.). quark tries to find a midway and just restrict itself to being static while still offering functions you only find in more bloated solutions and being as secure as possible (chroot, privilege dropping, strict parsers, no malloc at runtime, pledge, unveil, etc.). We believe that most of the web does not need to be dynamic and increasing complexity on server-side applications is one of the main reasons for the web obesity crisis. The common approach nowadays is to do everything on the server, including parsing requests, modifying files and databases, generating HTML and all that using unfit languages like PHP or JavaScript, which is a security and efficiency nightmare.
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Hiawatha
Hiawatha has been written with security in mind. This resulted in a highly secure webserver in both code and features. Hiawatha can stop SQL injections, XSS and CSRF attacks and exploit attempts. Via a specially crafted monitoring tool, you can keep track of all your webservers. You don't need to be a HTTP or CGI expert to get Hiawatha up and running. Its configuration syntax is easy to learn. The documentation and examples you can find on this website will give you all the information you need to configure your webserver within minutes. Although Hiawatha has everything a modern webserver needs, it's nevertheless a small and lightweight webserver. This makes Hiawatha ideal for older hardware or embedded systems. Special techniques are being used to keep the usage of resources as low as possible.
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H2O
H2O is a new generation HTTP server that provides a quicker response to users with less CPU utilization when compared to older generation of web servers. Designed from the ground up, the server takes full advantage of HTTP/2 features including prioritized content serving and server push, promising an outstanding experience to the visitors of your website. Full support for dependency and weight-based prioritization with server-side tweaks. Thanks to others, H2O is provided as a binary package on some environments. Therefore you may try to at first install the software using your favorite packaging system, and then resort to installing from source. Generally speaking, we believe that using LibreSSL is a better choice for running H2O, since LibreSSL not only is considered to be more secure than OpenSSL but also provides support for new ciphersuites.
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Cherokee
Cherokee is an innovative, feature-rich, lightning-fast and easy to configure open source web server designed for the next generation of highly concurrent secured web applications. All the configuration is done through Cherokee-Admin, a beautiful and powerful web interface. Cherokee supports the most widespread web technologies, FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, uWSGI, SSI, CGI, LDAP, TLS/SSL, HTTP proxying, video streaming, content caching, traffic shaping, etc. Cherokee runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD. It is highly efficient, extremely lightweight and provides rock-solid stability. Among its many features, there is one that deserves special credit, a user-friendly interface called cherokee-admin that is provided for a no-hassle configuration of every single feature of the server. This administration interface allows you to configure the webserver without having to worry about editing a text file written with a certain syntax.
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