Best Web Server Accelerator Software
Web server accelerators are used to reduce the amount of time it takes server-side for users to access websites or web applications. While web client accelerator software focuses on client-side improvements to connection speed, web server accelerators focus on improving connectivity at the web server or application server front. They focus specifically on how traffic comes into those servers and help improve server response time with techniques such as compression, HTTP optimization, and SSL/TLS offloading. This software serves to maximize end user experience with websites and web applications, as well as helps to reduce strain on web and application servers.
Network teams are most likely to be using web server accelerator software, though server analysts and engineers may also utilize it. Likely, you will see web server accelerators used in combination with load balancing software to create the quickest possible response time for connection requests.
To qualify for inclusion in the Web Server Accelerator category, a product must:
Best Web Server Accelerator Software At A Glance
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Abyss Web Server is a compact web server available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems.
- Information Technology and Services
- 43% Mid-Market
- 29% Enterprise
127 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Varnish Software’s powerful caching technology helps the world’s biggest content providers deliver lightning-fast web and streaming experiences for huge audiences, all over the globe. Our solutions
- Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 52% Mid-Market
- 37% Enterprise
2,845 Twitter followers
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NGINX, Inc. is the company behind NGINX, the popular open source project trusted by more than 400 million sites. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. The
- Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 42% Small-Business
- 40% Mid-Market
1,401 Twitter followers
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Fastly CDN provides maximum control and flexibility. It deploys edge cloud platform on dedicated POPs within your private network at locations of your choosing.
- Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 48% Mid-Market
- 30% Small-Business
29,238 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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NGINX Plus is the all-in-one load balancer, reverse proxy, web server, content cache, and API gateway.
- Information Technology and Services
- 57% Small-Business
- 29% Enterprise
1,401 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Easily add real-time web functionality to applications
- Information Technology and Services
- 46% Mid-Market
- 38% Small-Business
14,002,464 Twitter followers
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Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational DB in the cloud: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsof
- Computer Software
- 44% Enterprise
- 33% Small-Business
2,229,471 Twitter followers
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AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the availability and performance of the applications that you offer to your global users.
- 45% Mid-Market
- 27% Enterprise
2,229,471 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Speed Kit is the all-in-one page speed tool for high-traffic websites. Simple integration through the browser. Zero changes to your infrastructure. Turbocharge your website in 1 week and get instant
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer & Network Security
- 58% Small-Business
- 24% Mid-Market
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
WampServer is a Windows web development environment for Apache, MySQL, PHP databases.
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 68% Small-Business
- 30% Mid-Market
487 Twitter followers
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NCache is an Open Source in-memory distributed cache for .NET, Java, Node.js, and Scala. It is extremely fast and linearly scalable and caches application data to reduce expensive database trips. Org
- 40% Mid-Market
- 30% Small-Business
684 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of the site by improving the server performance.
- 90% Small-Business
- 10% Mid-Market
6,922 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
Apachebooster, An advanced cPanel plugin, tailored to improve the gross server performance of Apache Software. Blended with Nginx and Varnish, Apachebooster helps in improving the website loading spee
- 44% Small-Business
- 28% Enterprise
139 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Squid-Cache is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing.
- 56% Small-Business
- 50% Mid-Market
818 Twitter followers
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Lighttpd is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible.
- 64% Small-Business
- 36% Mid-Market
183 Twitter followers
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Both servers are actively developed and maintained by the same team, and are held to the same high-quality coding standard.
- 100% Small-Business
3,496 Twitter followers
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TwicPics streamlines your image management and makes all the best practices of responsive web images accessible with just a few lines of code. Easy to integrate, TwicPics performs image optimizatio
- 59% Small-Business
- 29% Enterprise
211 Twitter followers
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Cherokee is a feature rich, lightning fast and easy to configure open source web server designed for the next generation of highly concurrent secured web applications.
- 50% Mid-Market
- 25% Enterprise
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Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache
- 100% Mid-Market
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
WinGate Proxy Server is a highly capable HTTP Proxy server, SOCKS server, integrated Internet gateway and communications server designed to meet the access control, security and communications needs o
- 67% Small-Business
- 33% Mid-Market
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- User Satisfaction
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Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Gopher, SSL, and WAIS. This is an excellent solution to a variety of proxy and caching server needs, and scales from the branch office
- 100% Mid-Market
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Embedded web server solution for device or application needs.
- 100% Small-Business
989 Twitter followers
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MacHTTP-js is a full-featured Web server for 21st century desktops and servers. A "preview" release is available now for Mac users, followed by a general release for Windows 10 and Linux computers, in
- 100% Small-Business
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NitroPack is the leading all-in-one site speed solution that optimises more than 190,000 websites globally. NitroPack combines all the features a website owner might need to speed up their site, pass
- 67% Small-Business
- 33% Mid-Market
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- User Satisfaction
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TR7 ASP can intelligently load balance to physical hardware or virtual servers using Layer 3, Layer 4, and Layer 7 protocols in networks where it is positioned as a physical hardware or virtual device
- 60% Enterprise
- 40% Small-Business
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Say goodbye to slow-loading websites that drive users away. Experience lightning loading times, delighted visitors, and improved SEO rankings. Through advanced techniques, our page speed optimizer app
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- Overview
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HTMeLd is website accelerator software that boosts your website load times and responsiveness. This improves your Google "Page Experience" score, and therefore your Google rank. It does this by elim
26 Twitter followers
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Infinio provides lightning fast I/O for any storage.
1,072 Twitter followers
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Complete stand-alone web server engine for website and content hosting.
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RaidenHTTPD is a fully featured web server software for Windows platform.
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Riverbed SteelApp Web Accelerator is a standalone solution for web content optimization for any web application. It works with any application delivery controller (ADC), making it easy to upgrade and
18,023 Twitter followers
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Seminole is an embeddable webserver toolkit.
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SwiftCache Lite is a caching software service designed to allows to reduce capital expenditure, reduce operation costs and have hassle-free maintenance and upgrades.
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Viking Server is a compact single executable multi-protocol server providing everything from SMTP, pop and HTTP server to finger-proxy.
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WebFast offers solutions to optimize mobile web pages.
Learn More About Web Server Accelerator Software
What is Web Server Accelerator Software?
Web server accelerators, also known as reverse proxies or application delivery controllers, are used to reduce the time it takes server side for users to access websites or web applications. These tools help speed up content transfer between web servers and client browsers through various technical means. Web server accelerators are a subset of web accelerators installed in front of application servers and web servers, using a variety of techniques to improve performance for users trying to access the website or application that the server is serving.
While web client accelerator software focuses on client-side improvements to connection speed, web server accelerators focus on improving connectivity at the web or application server front. Web server accelerator software has become a staple for many companies as they continue to grow and expand their data center and computing powers across the globe.
What are the Common Features of Web Server Accelerator Software?
Web server accelerator software is a great way to ensure that all servers are running smoothly and that there are no issues that could cause a possible downtime. The following are some core features within server acceleration that can help users ensure that their servers are running well:
Caching and prefetching: Fetching information from servers every time it is requested can be a timely process. To speed this up, web server accelerators can refresh cached content at specific intervals so that content is never out of date. It can also preempt the user, prefetching or caching the content the user might ask for. This ensures that the user will get the content without delay.
Compression: Large files can take a long time to process. Web server accelerators can compress these large files, such as video files, to reduce the time they take to transfer.
Secure socket layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) processing: Although not present in all accelerators, some of the more advanced offerings can offload computationally intensive processing from backend servers, allowing them to serve content faster. For example, this is done with the decryption and encryption of documents during transmissions secured with SSL or TLS.
Server availability: Web server accelerator software allows the user to identify severely over or underutilized servers. This will enable administrators to set up a contingency plan in case there is a possibility of server failure. For instance, web server accelerator software can track the servers with low free disk space, is in a critical or warning state, has too high or too low device temperature, fan working is in a critical condition, etc. Then it would offload a few workloads to additional servers being underutilized.
What are the Benefits of Web Server Accelerator Software?
The following are a few of the benefits of web accelerator software.
Measures server health: The web server accelerator software tracks each metric, from CPU optimization to memory usage, disk allocation, response time, and several others. It ensures that the server is healthy and no issues are causing a system slowdown. Users can keep track of all components from a vantage point.
Promptly identifies server issues: Real-time web server accelerator software sends out prompts, alerting the user that there is an issue. This helps the user to be proactive. For numerous businesses that cannot afford downtime, which could lead to substantial monetary losses, this software helps keep servers functional at 100% efficiency without any lapses. In addition, this leads to quicker, more effective troubleshooting.
Provides performance monitoring: Performance statistics allow a user to analyze real-time data along with historical data and pinpoint causes and reasons that could cause a system failure.
Who Uses Web Server Accelerator Software?
IT teams (administration, development, and support): By using web server accelerator tools, the IT team can ensure that servers run smoothly and reduce downtime. They can receive alerts sent to the system administrator, who then raise them with the concerned system engineers to look into. The system engineers will be able to troubleshoot and solve the application performance and hosting issues, as well as changes in the server’s function. The team can also set performance monitoring benchmarks to maintain server efficiency.
Security management specialists: The team can use the data tracked by the server accelerator services to ensure that all servers are secure and are not compromised. The team would also be able to eliminate any risks even before they occur. In addition, this is extremely helpful when there are multiple servers to be monitored at various locations.
What are the Alternatives to Web Server Accelerator Software?
Alternatives to web server accelerator software can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:
Web client accelerator software: Web client accelerator software is used to reduce the time it takes client side for users to access websites or web applications. While web server accelerator software focuses on server-side improvements to connection speed, web client accelerators focus on improving connectivity and load time within the client’s browser or application.
Challenges with Web Server Accelerator Software
Web server accelerator software solutions can come with their own set of challenges:
Managing an increasing number of servers: Paramount importance is being given to IT infrastructure, driven by the need to work from home and ensure business continuity. Companies are investing heavily in expanding their server infrastructure to support high-speed data processing, file transfers, and smooth operations. As the number of servers increases, it becomes difficult for web server accelerator tools to scale and keep up with the rate of servers being added, and therefore also need to be updated continuously.
Hardware health and environment issues: Some issues can happen beyond the control of the administrators, such as power outages, UPS failure, temperature and humidity levels in a data center, failure of the cooling system, and fan breakdown, which are hard to control. If a web server fails and the website freezes, server monitoring tools could be set up automatically to do a force restart and then check whether the issue is solved. If not, it can alert the required system administrators to check on what is causing the errors.
Seeing the big picture limitations: System administrators would use the software to answer the question, “Is my server working correctly, and if not, what can I do to fix it?.” Although this is the core capability of the software, there is a challenge of not looking at the bigger picture where the data and insight pulled from the monitoring software can factor well into strategic business decisions.
How to Buy Web Server Accelerator Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Web Server Accelerator Software
When making a purchase decision to opt for a server accelerator solution, the primary goal is to select software that is well aligned with the buyer’s business desire and budget. For instance, if a buyer has a smaller budget and only requires software to maintain server health, they can opt for a free version or a basic offering with minimum features. Conversely, suppose a buyer requires software that can handle a gamut of operations and run large advanced tasks. In that case, they can opt for a more sophisticated and feature-rich web server accelerator software.
As companies continue to grow and expand operations, buyers must choose software that can support current server requirements and future upgrades. It is a good practice to check with the software vendor if the monitoring software can also support the buyer in the long term. This is extremely important to ensure hardware compatibility in the future as well.
Compare Web Server Accelerator Software Products
Create a long list
The buyer needs to scrutinize their company's IT systems environment and applications to choose the right web server accelerator software. This would include whether these servers are on-premises or virtual (on the cloud), the location of the servers, etc. Once the customer has decided that they require server accelerator tools, the next step would be to make a long list of the best web server accelerator software presently available in the market. Long lists help eliminate software that does not provide critical functionality, thereby reducing the list to be more compact and precise.
Create a short list
Once the list has been narrowed down, the customer can begin to compare different features and offerings of the web server accelerator software per the company's needs. Pricing decisions are also taken to ensure that the selected software fits the IT budget. A highly efficient method of comparing various web server accelerator software would be to opt for technology review platforms, such as g2.com, which provide unbiased reviews and different perspectives on the benefits or issues with various products.
Conduct demos
Once the list has been further narrowed down, customers can then opt to check if the vendors are providing a live demo or a free trial version (with limited functionality). This is a great way for buyers to ensure that the software is the right choice for the customer. They can use the trial versions before finally committing to the purchase decision.
Selection of Web Server Accelerator Software
Choose a selection team
Creating a selection team that will work together throughout the entire process, from identifying pain points to implementation, is crucial. The team should consist of organization members with the right interest, skills, and time to participate in this process. A good way is to get three to five people who fill roles such as the main decision maker, project manager, process owner, system owner, or IT administrator. In smaller companies, fewer participants would multitask and take on more responsibilities.
Negotiation
Prices on a company's pricing page are not always fixed (although some companies will not budge). It is crucial to open up a conversation regarding pricing and licensing. For example, the vendor may be willing to give a discount for multi-year contracts or for recommending the product to others.
Final decision
Before going all in, it is recommended to roll out a test run or pilot program to test adoption with a small sample size of users. If the tool is well used and well liked, the buyer can be confident that the selection was correct. If not, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
