Zeus Web Server was a proprietary web server for Unix and Unix-like platforms (including Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX and Linux). It was developed by Zeus Technology, a software company located in Cambridge, England. The original authors and company founders are University of Cambridge graduates Damian Reeves and Adam Twiss.
Support for AIX, Tru64, and Mac OS X was dropped on 10 June 2008. No new ZWS releases have been made since January 2010, and the company no longer offers a similar server solution. In July 2011, the company was acquired by Riverbed Technology, who ended support for ZWS on November 30, 2014.
Zeus was designed to be a high-performance web server and was commonly used by hardware vendors submitting SPECweb99 benchmarks for their hardware. The SPECweb99 benchmark was retired in 2005 and replaced by SPECweb2005. While some SPECweb2005 submissions were made using Zeus, by 2008 it was no longer among the top performers.
In addition to static content serving, Zeus supported dynamic content via CGI, FastCGI, Apache JServ, ISAPI, NSAPI, mod_perl, SSI and Zeus Distributed Authentication and Content (ZDAC), a proprietary FastCGI-like protocol. While Zeus mainly competed with other commercial web servers such as Oracle iPlanet Web Server, it also claimed a high degree of compatibility with Apache HTTP Server (including .htaccess support and a URL rewriting system comparable to Apache's mod_rewrite), with the expectation that Apache users would migrate to Zeus as their server load increased. NSAPI and ISAPI were supported to ease migrations from Microsoft IIS and Sun Java System Web Server.