Webservers

Is it an Attack Helicopter? NO! A Motorcycle? WRONG AGAIN! A Native American? GETTING CLOSER! Wait it’s a single feather? YOU GOT IT! Well, that and a webserver, but who’s counting.

Apache2 vs everything else

Apache2 likely the most controversial pick for the LAMP stack in 2017 recently overshadowed by other webservers like Nginx. Apache still holds the highest market share in 2017 with ~44% of the market, IIS comes in 2nd with ~24% and Nginx takes the bronze with ~19%. Nginx is growing the fastest and will likely overtake Apache (eventually), as the standard free and open source web server. The biggest caveat with Apache2 is that it doesn’t scale nearly as well as Nginx when considering a massive user load. Apache2 spawns a new process for each person who accesses the site O(n), Nginx pulls that user into an existing process with almost no overhead O(1). Now when talking polynomial number complexity going from ‘n’ to ‘1’ is a pretty big deal, and this will eventually cause Apache to change their core threading or Nginx should take over.

But Dave if Nginx is so great why do you still use Apache?

Good question. I continue to use Apache for many reasons.

Overall Support
- Apache2 has a massive user base and consequently is an extremely robust web server with numerous modules and existing integration and support with other integral software, like PHP, WHM, cPanel, SSL, etc.
- It’s extremely easy to install
Very secure
- Apache has tide and true security, mod_security.
- I’ve never had any breakin’s where the culprit was Apache itself
Mods
- Apache’s extremely extensible
- mod_deflate, mod_pagespeed, mod_security, etc
REGEX & .htaccess
- I like the way .htaccess modularizes each account.
- Familair with the Apache directives used in redirects and permissions.
- Regular expressions give me the control I need to make quick and concise changes to routing that yield a large impact.
vhosts
- Easy to use, easy to setup

Cloud hosting

Amazon Web Services (AWS) changed the internet game. Amazon built an incredibly scalable internet giant that delivers not only compute and storage services, but thousands of pre-built, pre-configured provisioned systems you can simply request and they’ll be built on the fly. It’s not incredibly cheap, and at the end of the day your data isn’t physically with you, but it’s very reliable. I don’t have much experience working in a cloud environment, but I one day hope to. It’s the wave of the future.