Lately I have been thinking of switching from my current web server, which is Nginx, to something smaller, less resource-intensive and more hackable. Since such web server software does not support PHP or in some cases even CGI, it will probably take a while until I made this website use only static (x)html. In meantime however, here is a list of some interesting HTTP daemons, that I found.

Link: http://tools.suckless.org/quark/

Quark is an interesting one, because it is made by the suckless people, but unlike other suckless software such as DWM or ST, it's rather unknown and even less so used. I like the idea of it not using TLS, since I don not think this is a necessary feature for a static website (which is what quark is for), and in that sense they are also right about the traffic just being able to be reverse proxied, if there was a need for it, but again, such websites would not use quark in first place.

I actually tried setting up Quark on a Raspberry PI running NetBSD-current, but it didn't compile, and after a few dozen minutes of trying to get it to work, I lost patience and resorted to Nginx. I suppose it probably compiles on GNU/Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD though.

Link: http://svn.nishi.boats/repo/tewi/

I don't know much about this one, but it looks interesting. I will do some research on it and report back.

Link: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/httpd/

This one is not really “lesser known”, as most Sysadmin types probably heard of or used it at some point, but in comparison to all the big names, it probably still can be considered small. I find this to be a very pleasant webserver to configure, partly because the very readable configuration file syntax, but also because is gives error messages, which can be understood by the sane. The obvious downside herein is that it is designed to be run on OpenBSD and if you are not on OpenBSD, you theoretically still can use it, but it's quite tedious and not as easy as having it already preinstalled.

Link: https://www.w3.org/Daemon/

While the other ones are already somewhat of obscure hipster softwares, this gets the prize for being the number one special snowflake HTTP daemon. I don't think there is any reason to run CERN HTTPd in the current year of the LORD 2011+14, be it either because the code base is ancient and has a bunch of bugs in it , or simply because it's the first web server to have existed. Either way, it's probably not a smart idea to run this, however, the source code is quite interesting. For example they constantly use macros called “PRIVATE” or “PUBLIC” at the beginning of some functions and it somewhat reminds me of access modifiers in languages like Java or C++, but I have no clue what they actually do.