There is somewhat of a meme around the sysadmin and web world that Apache is a bad web server that no one should use, or at least not use for very long. And if you're using Apache or thinking about configuring something with Apache, maybe you should think about how to migrate away or pick a setup that will make that easy. I once sort of felt this way and experimented with (and still use) alternatives like lighttpd, but I no longer do so; these days I think that Apache is your best default choice for a web server.

I will put it like this: choosing Apache is a lot like choosing to write code with a high-level 'scripting' language like Python or Ruby instead of C++, Java, or Go. The result is not always as fast as it could be but often it will be pretty good (sometimes excellent), much of what most people are doing doesn't need the flat out speed, and the whole thing is easy to set up, quite convenient, and does a lot for you, including things you may not initially realize that you want or need.

Apache is not likely to be the highest performing or least resource using web server you can configure (although you might be surprised). However in real life most of the web sites most people set up do not need to support massive loads (and when they do you may find that the bottlenecks are not in the web server). And what Apache gives you is almost unmatched support for easily set up and deployed web app systems. CGI scripts are very simple; PHP files can simply be dropped into place; Python applications need only mod_wsgi; even Ruby on Rails apparently has an Apache module. If you want to use FastCGI and app daemons and other higher-capacity things, well, Apache supports that too. Not infrequently it will give your simple applications practical performance boosts, for example by compressing their HTTP responses when possible.

(In my personal interest of TLS security I've also wound up feeling that Apache is in practice at the forefront of allowing you to set up good TLS configurations. Other web servers can have spotty support for various things, but Apache is almost always there. These days I recommend that people who care about TLS look very carefully at anything other than Apache.)

Apache can have what I've called the Apache configuration tax, where for simple setups (like static file service) other web servers can have simpler setups with less configuration work to do. On the other hand I've found that sensible Apache configurations create very simple Apache setups. And any complex server design is probably going to be complex to express in a configuration, regardless of what web server you're using.

All of this leaves me feeling three things about Apache. First, Apache is a perfectly sensible choice as your web server, one that shouldn't need defending any more than a choice of a more sexy and talked about web server like nginx (or lighttpd, which no longer seems to be the latest hotness). Second, Apache probably should be your default choice of web server. Unless you already have special expertise and tooling for other web servers or unless you can clearly see why Apache is a bad fit for your target environment, just going with Apache will probably make your life easier and work just as well. And finally, that Apache deserves more love in general. It's really time for Apache to (re)take its place as a perfectly respectable web server, not the embarrassing relative we don't talk about.

(I'll admit that this is kind of a rant because I've decided that I don't want to feel defensive any time I talk about using Apache. But my views have really shifted on this over time, as I used to share the common attitude that Apache was outdated or at least a catastrophic performer (not really, actually, to my surprise in that situation). My personal site still runs lighttpd, but I'm not convinced that that's the right decision; it persists partly out of inertia and partly because Fedora's Apache configuration setup is terrible.)