To run a website – be it static or dynamic content, you need access to a web server. At the least, you have to upload the files to the web server to begin serving your web pages. Here are a list of open source web servers which have a growing user following :

1. Apache web server – Those who haven’t heard about Apache web server are far and in between; especially if they are web enthusiasts. Netcraft ranks Apache as having garnered nearly 50% of the web server market share (Date: Aug 1005 – May 2008). Almost 99% of the shared hosting is done using Apache web server.
2. Lighttpd – It stands for light httpd and is named so because it has a very small memory footprint compared to other web servers with similar features. It is light, secure, fast in serving files and flexible. lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Meebo. The developers claim it’s high speed io-infrastructure allows them to scale several times better with the same hardware than with alternative web-servers.
3. Fnord – fnord is a small and fast web server with CGI-capability and has been written by Felix von Leitner. fnord supports virtual hosting and runs under tcpserver.
4. Nginx – This is a HTTP server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev. It is small, uses a modular architecture and runs on BSD’s (FreeBSD), Linux, Solaris and Mac OSX. The author claims, Nginx has been running for more than three years on many heavily loaded Russian sites.
5. Savant – This is a full-featured open source web server written for computers running Windows which includes Windows 95,98,NT,2000 and XP. Savant is fast, secure, easy-to-use, and free! It can be configured using a graphical tool and has support for perl and CGI among other things.
6. Tornado – Is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers Facebook FriendFeed’s real-time functionality. While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s webapp, web.py), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic. Read further about the technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server.
7. G-WAN – Is a free (not open source) web (application) server with ANSI-C scripts.