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I'm looking for a Personal web server to host very light traffic meant for home use only.

What is your take on personal web servers that meet some or most of the criteria below?

  • Free/Open source
  • Runs on Windows and possibly Linux (Ubuntu)
  • Very light on resources
  • No installation required or standalone file
  • Admin console - GUI or Web based
  • Supports multiple hosts/port mappings

I have tried Abyss who's standard edition is free but limited to one host only. I've seen lite speed, haven't tried though XAAMP is another one I'm considering...

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migrated from serverfault.com Mar 2 '10 at 12:31

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10 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Apache is not the lightest, but it still doesn't use that many resources. It is free, and is kind of the standard of webservers. It would be my recommendation.

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its feature rich and powerful, close to IIS or even beats it maybe, but as u said, its not light and i don't need something as heavy as that. besides the fact that it uses java and i don't use JRE or anything java at all. – Mrchief Mar 1 '10 at 18:13
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Apache does not require Java. Two popular lighter ones are nigix and lightpd, I still recommend Apache. You can compile it and configure it to be pretty light. Can use the threaded model, configure it to have less threads etc... – Kyle Brandt Mar 1 '10 at 18:28
both nginx and lightpd lack an admin gui. i need something quick n easy like Abyss offers. i'd give apache a try at home. – Mrchief Mar 1 '10 at 18:53
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Apache is widely used and widely supported, it's probably one of the easier ones to use (especially for light use) because of this. – Chris S Mar 1 '10 at 19:32
@Mrchief: You don't need a GUI for Apache...there's one conf-file, and that's it. – Bobby Mar 2 '10 at 12:33
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up vote 3 down vote

I'm surprised not to see Lighttpd.

http://www.lighttpd.net/

It isn't GUI based but it sure is light on resources and powerful.

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up vote 1 down vote

I've used XAMPP a number of times for development systems and/or small deployments. It's a good solution if you want a self-contained Apache/PHP/MySQL system. It will allow you to have multiple hosts as well since it uses Apache. And, if any of your personal stuff requires a database, it's part of the package, so nothing extra to hunt for.

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installer size is in mega bytes!! don't want something that fat. – Mrchief Mar 2 '10 at 2:38
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What's the big deal about the size of the installer? Downloading it by dial up? – Jon Rhoades Mar 2 '10 at 3:21
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up vote 1 down vote

I saw that Cherokee was not listed yet, it is one amazingly fast and stable server, runs on Linux and Windows.

http://www.cherokee-project.com

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up vote 0 down vote

On Windows platforms, Baby Web Server could be a good alternative:

http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/html/baby_web_server.html

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up vote 0 down vote

not open source, but free for a 'standard' version. http://litespeedtech.com/litespeed-web-server-editions.html very good, easy to setup and just works.

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up vote 0 down vote

HFS File server is a standalone file. Its awesome and totally free.

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up vote 0 down vote

It really depends on your OS, and whether you want to host static or dynamic pages. i ran xitami for years as my personal server mostly for static pages, but i ran a perl based forum too - no install required, single config file. Not tried multiple host and ports, but considering how simple it is to get up and running (download a zip file,unzip, config, fire it up) its worth a shot

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up vote 0 down vote

I personally would recommend Lighttpd. It runs with an extremely low overhead and short of a GUI-based config, has one of the neatest and easiest to understand configuration file(s).

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up vote 0 down vote accepted

After using several of them, I think Abyss suits the best to my needs. This has many features out of the box is very light. Thanks everyone for their inputs.

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