Knowledge base
Web Servers & Reverse Proxies
The programs that accept connections and decide how requests flow: nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed, Caddy, and Traefik, plus the configuration habits that make them fast, cached, and hard to take down.
6 topics · 6 articles
- nginx: The Web Server That Scales by Event Loops
nginx handles more of the web's traffic than any other server for a structural reason: it solves C10K with an event-driven, asynch…
- Apache httpd: The Original Web Server, Still Earning Its Place
Apache httpd powered three decades of the web, and the Apache Running After Maturity era is real: the event MPM made mod_php-class…
- nginx vs Apache: Which Server Runs Which Workload?
nginx and Apache are the two engines a hosting stack can be built on, and the fight ends the moment the workload is named. nginx i…
- LiteSpeed: The Drop-in Apache Compatible Performance Engine
LiteSpeed is the commercial web server built to read Apache configs and outperform Apache's concurrency: event-driven, tuned heavi…
- Caddy: The Web Server That Configures HTTPS by Default
Caddy is the modern web server and reverse proxy whose headline is automatic TLS: ACME issuance and renewal work out of the box vi…
- Traefik: The Reverse Proxy That Reads Your Infrastructure
Traefik is the cloud-native reverse proxy built for environments where backends change constantly: Docker labels, Kubernetes CRDs,…
Field notes
Web servers are the most exposed software on any production system, and the choice between them is less about raw speed benchmarks than about workload shape: .htaccess-heavy shared hosting behaves differently than a static edge, and reverse-proxy habits matter more than engine purity. This category exists because even long-lived ops teams drift into cargo-culted proxy configs that only an incident exposes.
The operational discipline is the same across every engine in this category: config tests before reloads, logs watched for the error floods that precede outages, TLS automation that is rehearsed rather than assumed, and a staging mirror for anything that changes connection behavior. The engines differ; the habits do not.
Related areas
Related services
Server problem? Hacked site? Slow website?
Critical issues answered within 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.