> Some might prefer Caddy, which is another great web server with automatic HTTPS: https://caddyserver.com/ but the Apache modules do pretty much everything I need and the performance has never actually been too bad for my needs. Up until now, applications themselves have always been the bottleneck, actually working on a blog post about comparing some web servers in real world circumstances.
For some reason Apache gets bad rap for being old and slow while in reality it's still a pretty damn good at what it does. I worked at hosting provider that used Apache on all of their servers and I have never had any doubts that Apache is more than enough for all the things I might ever want to do with it. Sure, it doesn't serve up Markdown files as Caddy does, but as for performance then Apache itself has never been a bottleneck either. It's always the application or the database, never Apache.
> For some reason Apache gets bad rap for being old and slow while in reality it's still a pretty damn good at what it does.
There's a few actual reasons for why this might be the case, because in some configurations Apache can indeed be somewhat slow.
.htaccess: if you don't disable this mechanism, the web server might do a bit too much I/O, their docs describe it all nicely and it's good to pay attention to this, because you won't always need .htaccess in the first place https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/htaccess.html
mod_php: some don't bother setting up PHP-FPM properly (assuming that you want to run PHP apps with Apache) and instead reach for the legacy module which has considerably worse performance than the alternative https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/HTTPD/PHP
Once I get some more motivation, I'll do a real world comparison of Apache, Nginx and probably Caddy as well in a variety of workloads. My intuition tells me that Apache will still be slower, but not to a degree where it would be a non-starter for the majority of the projects out there.
For some reason Apache gets bad rap for being old and slow while in reality it's still a pretty damn good at what it does. I worked at hosting provider that used Apache on all of their servers and I have never had any doubts that Apache is more than enough for all the things I might ever want to do with it. Sure, it doesn't serve up Markdown files as Caddy does, but as for performance then Apache itself has never been a bottleneck either. It's always the application or the database, never Apache.