Best Web Servers for Windows

As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications. Upon each connection, the callback is fired, but if there is no work to be done, Node.js will sleep. This is in contrast to today's more common concurrency model, in which OS threads are employed. Thread-based networking is relatively inefficient and very difficult to use. Furthermore, users of Node.js are free from worries of dead-locking the process, since there are no locks. Almost no function in Node.js directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks except when the I/O is performed using synchronous methods of Node.js standard library. Because nothing blocks, scalable systems are very reasonable to develop in Node.js. Node.js is similar in design to, and influenced by, systems like Ruby's Event Machine and Python's Twisted. Node.js takes the event model a bit further. It presents an event loop as a runtime construct instead of as a library.

NGINX Open Source: The open source web server that powers more than 400 million websites. NGINX Plus is a software load balancer, web server, and content cache built on top of open source NGINX. Use NGINX Plus instead of your hardware load balancer and get the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure. Save more than 80% compared to hardware ADCs, without sacrificing performance or functionality. Deploy anywhere: public cloud, private cloud, bare metal, virtual machines, and containers. Save time by performing common tasks through the built‑in NGINX Plus API. From NetOps to DevOps, modern app teams need a self‑service, API‑driven platform that integrates easily into CI/CD workflows to accelerate app deployment – whether your app has a hybrid or microservices architecture – and makes app lifecycle management easier.

Monkey is a lightweight and powerful web server and development stack for Linux & OSX. It has been designed to be very scalable with low memory and CPU consumption, the perfect solution for embedded devices. Made for ARM, x86 and x64. Monkey is a lightweight and scalable Web Server. Originally made for Linux, it's also compatible with OSX. It have been designed with a strong focus on Embedded devices, therefore its scalable by nature having a low memory and CPU consumption, making it a real solution for high-end production servers too. Monkey is built and tested for different architectures such as ARM, x86 and x64. Monkey uses a hybrid mechanism composed by a fixed number of threads being each one capable to attend thousands of clients thanks to the event-driven model based in asynchronous sockets. The interaction between the scheduler and each worker thread is lock-free, avoiding race conditions and exposing a huge performance compared to other available options.

Kestrel is a cross-platform web server for ASP.NET Core. Kestrel is the web server that's included and enabled by default in ASP.NET Core project templates. Kestrel supports HTTPS, HTTP/2 (except on macOS), Opaque upgrade used to enable WebSockets, Unix sockets for high performance behind Nginx. Kestrel is supported on all platforms and versions that .NET Core supports. Some browsers require granting explicit permission to trust the local development certificate. Project templates configure apps to run on HTTPS by default and include HTTPS redirection and HSTS support. The Kestrel web server has constraint configuration options that are especially useful in Internet-facing deployments. There's a separate limit for connections that have been upgraded from HTTP or HTTPS to another protocol (for example, on a WebSockets request). The default maximum request body size is 30,000,000 bytes, which is approximately 28.6 MB.

Mongoose turns a software product, a device or appliance into a web server, accessible by a browser. One of the most common use cases is to use Mongoose to add a Web-accessible control panel for a device. Ready-to-go examples and tutorials for common functionalities like authentication, live logs, video streaming. Using Mongoose, it is easy to create various API to control your device or application remotely, via browser, mobile phone, or automation tools. We have created an extremely memory-efficient, easy-to-use, MIT-licensed JSON library to use together with Mongoose. Real-time, full-duplex communication over MQTT or Websocket. Exchange plain data, or wrap data into JSON to use JSON-RPC! Mongoose turns a software product, a device or appliance into a web server, accessible by a browser. Upload device data to a cloud server of your choice. Use a 3rd party cloud provider, or spin your own.

Caddy simplifies your infrastructure. It takes care of TLS certificate renewals, OCSP stapling, static file serving, reverse proxying, Kubernetes ingress, and more. Its modular architecture means you can do more with a single, static binary that compiles for any platform. Caddy runs great in containers because it has no dependencies—not even libc. Run Caddy practically anywhere. Caddy obtains and renews TLS certificates for your sites automatically. It even staples OCSP responses. Its novel certificate management features are the most mature and reliable in its class. Written in go, Caddy offers greater memory safety than servers written in C. A hardened TLS stack powered by the go standard library serves a significant portion of all Internet traffic. Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy.

Cowboy is the ultimate server for the modern Web with support for Websocket, HTTP/2 and REST. Cowboy is a small, fast and modern HTTP server for Erlang/OTP. Cowboy aims to provide a complete modern Web stack. This includes HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSocket, server-sent events and Webmachine-based REST. Cowboy comes with functions for introspection and tracing, enabling developers to know precisely what is happening at any time. Its modular design also easily enables developers to add instrumentation. Cowboy is a high-quality project. It has a small code base, is very efficient (both in latency and memory use) and can easily be embedded in another application. Cowboy is clean Erlang code. It includes hundreds of tests and its code is fully compliant with the Dialyzer. It is also well documented and features a function reference, a user guide and numerous tutorials. Knowledge of the HTTP protocol is recommended but not required, as it will be detailed throughout the guide.

Seminole is an embeddable webserver toolkit designed to be non-invasive and easily retrofitted to existing applications, lightweight with low resource consumption, and highly reliable with proper standards compliance and security safeguards. Written using a subset of C++, Seminole provides a modular, high-level API which simultaneously insulates the client programmer from complicated protocol details while allowing total control over low-level operation when necessary. Add in the optional Application Framework for a complete stateful and message-based development environment. Another important feature Seminole has is a powerful discovery service. The Seminole discovery protocol uses IP multicast to find locate Seminole instances even if you don't know the address of the devices. Additionally the discovery protocol can send small amounts of status information periodically.