Likelihood to Recommend As I mentioned earlier, the Apache HTTP Server has a small disadvantage compared to the competition (
NGINX ) in terms of performance. If you run websites that really have a lot of visitors,
NGINX might be the better alternative.
On the other hand, the Apache HTTP Server is open source and free. Further functionalities can be activated via modules. The documentation is really excellent.
Read full review It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
Read full review Pros Street Cred: Apache Web Server is the Founder for all of Apache Foundation's other projects. Without the Web Server, Apache Foundation would look very different. That being said, they have done a good job of maintaining the code base, and keeping a lot of what makes Apache so special Stability: Apache is rock-solid. While no software is perfect, Apache can parse your web sources quickly and cleanly. Flexibility: Need to startup your own Webpage? Done. Wordpress? Yup. REST Endpoint? Check. Honeypot? Absolutely. Read full review Low-Cost Load Balancer Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc. SSL Termination Read full review Cons The default configurations which comes with Apache server needs to get optimized for performance and security with every new installation as these defaults are not recommended to push on the production environment directly. Security options and advanced configurations are not easy to set up and require an additional level of expertise. Admin frontend GUI could be improved to a great extent to match with other enterprise tools available to serve similar requirements. Read full review A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this. Read full review Usability It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
Read full review Support Rating I give this rating because there is so much Apache documentation and information on the web that you can literally do anything. This has to do with the fact that there is a huge Open Source community that is beyond mature and perhaps one of the most helpful to be found. The only thing that should hold anyone back from anything is that they can not read. RTFM, my friend. And I must say that the manual is excellent.
Read full review We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I has a lot more features, except that IIS is more integrated in a Windows environment. But now with .net core also possible from Apache it would work anywhere really. Only in a full Windows environment where full integration is needed I would chose to go for IIS. Otherwise Apache it is.
Read full review We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
Read full review Return on Investment Works as intended, so it's less to worry about. Works great on elastic environments (like EC2). As an Open Source project, you can get support for almost any problem you can have. Configuration files, while powerful, can be tricky to dominate for some. Read full review Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there. Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past. Read full review ScreenShots