Comparison of web server software

This article is a comparison of web server software.

The first web servers only supported static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they most commonly allow embedding of server side applications, written in some programming language. Sometimes a setup of a separate web server software, apart from your application, isn't needed; e.g. the Django framework, for Python, includes a web server, and later versions of the official PHP language runtime, that historically was dependent on the Apache web server, now include a web server, but that embedded web server is meant to be used only for development (i.e. not in a production environment).