Web Servers

There are many different web application servers to choose from.  In some cases, depending on your development platform, you are restricted to a limited selection of web servers.  In other cases, you will put together many different web application servers to provide a cohesive site.  For example, your site uses Wordpress and you are using a Java based forum.  You will most likely incorporate elements of Apache web server in addition to Tomcat to serve up your content.  Also your choice in hosting provider will also limit your choices and may also dictate your development platform.  For example, many shared hosting providers implement the venerable LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySQL, and PHP).  

Installing Apache 2.4.3 and Magento Community Edition

Magento is a popular e-commerce platform.  Recently I had a requirement to install Magento on a new server.  After using popular environments such as Nginx and Lightttpd with PHP-FPM, I was having a difficult time going back to Apache.  After looking at the latest release notes for Apache, I noticed that the 2.4 series fully supports the event MPM.  Now I realize that you can run Magento on LightHTTPD and Nginx and there is pretty decent documentation for it.  After some careful thought, I decided to give Apache a try.

Nginx, PHP-FPM, and Yii Clean URLs

Yii provides an excellent PHP develop framework for any web based application.  Yii  includes a robust database abstraction layer and Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that is a pleasure to work with and easy to understand.  You can easily build complex websites rapidly.  Recently I built http://www.hdrspotting.com using the popular Yii framework.  Ordinarily this would have been a monumental task, but with Yii, I found I could rapidly build a complex site in a short amount of time.

Drupal 7, PHP-FPM and Nginx

Using PHP-FPM and Nginx provides an alternate way of hosting Drupal sites.  There are numerous reasons why you may want to consider hosting Drupal this way.  Apache is a process based server.  This means that each request from a web client consumes a single thread.  These threads are processes that run concurrently to handle each request.  Nginx is an asyncronous, event based server.  This means that each request is handled by a single or a few threads.

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