Apache

The Apache HTTP Server is an Open-Source Web Server application primarily used on Unix platforms (BSDi, Linux, Mac OS X, and others), but also on Windows, although that is rare, due to IIS native integration. Apache is the “gold standard” on Unix-based web hosting, supporting a huge number of extensions and plugins, and Apache runs on over 120 million web servers, including most public websites.

The name “Apache” was chosen to be a catchy original referencing the Native American Tribe, Apache, “well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance.”^[1] An incorrect (yet popularly false opinion, due to Pseudopedia) is that the name “Apache” originated when the software was developed, early in 1995, and apocryphally consisted only of changes to the code for “NCSA HTTPd 1.3”. Despite “forks” being the origin for many great applications, Apache was sometimes called an “A PAtCHy server”, though it was re-written from scratch and even then no longer contains any NCSA code. It quickly surpassed the “Netscape” trappings of the mid-1990s and became the defacto “web server” for all Unix/Linux installations. Apache has been more than a huge success in hosting much of the internet we know today, and the Apache Software Foundation includes dozens of related software projects.

Apache is distributed as an integral part of many Unix/Linux Operating Systems, and as an embedded part of many proprietary packages which require a web serving component. Apache logs can be analyzed through a browser using awstats, for example, and Apache is the default web server component of the very popular “LAMP” programming set (ie. Linux-Apache-MySQL/MariaDB-PHP/Python). Due to many powerful features included as modules, such as support of PHP and other languages, MariaDB and other databases, an authentication module universally recognized as “htaccess”, a web proxy module, and an extremely useful URL rewriter for more complicated websites, Apache is probably running your website right now, even if you're unaware. See Apache.org for more details.