List of Top Free Open Source & Self Hosted Application for Web Servers

A web server is a piece of software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS.

Algernon – Small self-contained pure-Go web server with Lua, Markdown, HTTP/2, QUIC, Redis and PostgreSQL support. BSD-3-Clause Go
Apache HTTP Server – Secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards. Apache-2.0 C
Caddy – Powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS. Apache-2.0 Go
HAProxy – Very fast and reliable reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. GPL-2.0 C
Hiawatha – An advanced and secure webserver for Unix. GPL-2.0 C
Lighttpd – Secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. BSD-3-Clause C
Nginx – HTTP and reverse proxy server, mail proxy server, and generic TCP/UDP proxy server. BSD-2-Clause C
Traefik – HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. MIT Go/Docker
Varnish – Web application accelerator/caching HTTP reverse proxy. BSD-2-Clause C