A web server is a piece of software that accepts a network request from a user agent, typically a web browser, and returns either the appropriate response for the request or an error message. Two dominant solutions for HTTP servers today are Apache and Nginx. However, a new player in the space, Caddy Web Server, is gaining traction for its ease of use. By Ayooluwa Isaiah.
Nginx is currently being utilized on over 40 percent of the top 10,000 websites. When you consider that Cloudflare Server also utilizes Nginx under the hood for content delivery, the figure is even higher. Caddy is an open source web server platform designed to be simple, easy to use, and secure. Written in Go with zero dependencies, Caddy is easy to download and runs on almost every platform that Go compiles on. In terms of performance, Caddy has been shown to be competitive with Apache but behind Nginx both in terms of requests handled per second and stability under load.
The article then compares configuration and performance of Apache, Nginx and Caddy.
If your primary concern is performance, or you plan to serve a large amount of static content, Nginx is likely your best option. While Caddy is easy to configure and performant for most use cases, if you need flexibility and customization, Apache is your best bet. Easy read!
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