The Apache HTTP Server started in 1995, and its name comes from being “a patchy server” — a set of patches applied to the NCSA HTTPd codebase, the dominant web server of the very early web.
Taking Over the Web
Apache became the most popular web server on the internet by 1996 and held that position for well over a decade, becoming almost synonymous with “web server” during the web’s initial explosive growth — the “A” in the LAMP stack.
The Apache Software Foundation
The project’s success led to the creation of the Apache Software Foundation in 1999, which now oversees hundreds of open-source projects far beyond the original web server — Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, and Apache Hadoop all trace their governance lineage back to this same foundation.
Losing the Top Spot
Nginx, released in 2004 specifically to address the C10K problem (handling ten thousand concurrent connections efficiently), gradually overtook Apache in usage share through the 2010s as traffic patterns shifted toward high-concurrency, static-content-heavy workloads that suited its event-driven architecture particularly well.
Still Everywhere
Despite losing the top usage spot, Apache remains one of the most widely deployed web servers in the world, particularly on shared hosting where .htaccess support remains a genuinely important feature Nginx doesn’t offer in the same way.