Well Suited: Perfect for hosting your own website. And, I don't mean just an individual with a port of MySpace. I mean an industrial strength, commercial grade replacement for Microsoft IIS. If you need a web server that provides a feature-rich environment with support for multiple sites (hosted in the same server), with such features as virtual hosting, and modular feature design, than Apache Web Server is right on the money. Less Well-Suited: Single page, small feature-set websites. Apache is a lot of trouble for developers to set up, just to send/receive JSON strings of a few bytes. You're really better off using something smaller and faster/simpler (lighttpd for example).
SonicWall Web Application Firewall is appropriate to stay on the edge of our network and inspect all data that comes and goes in order to preserve the health of the network. In these scenarios, we are protected from DoS and DDoS attacks, malware threats, ransomware attacks, data theft, and others. Sonicwall's web application and threat management is intelligent and interrogates the behavior, communication logic, and, in addition, any changes and anomalies in the protocol.
Apache is Open Source, governed well (the foundation) and probably the most stable computing platform ever.
Apache is probably one of the most customizable and configurable pieces of software that I have ever run across in more than 30 years of development.
If there is something that Apache can not do, then you need to ask yourself; should I be doing that? The point here is that it is a solid solution and seems to only integrate other technologies that are of the highest caliber.
Apache will live forever and you can not go wrong with it.
I give this rating because there is so much Apache documentation and information on the web that you can literally do anything. This has to do with the fact that there is a huge Open Source community that is beyond mature and perhaps one of the most helpful to be found. The only thing that should hold anyone back from anything is that they can not read. RTFM, my friend. And I must say that the manual is excellent.
Technical support is a little expensive but it works. Any technical problem or not, SonicWall support helps in solving the problems. The SLA is fast and the service is also cordial, functional, and straight to the point. Support is essential to keep the tool always up-to-date with lists of malware, URLs, attacks, and others.
The comparison with other products from IBM or Oracle is difficult. These are mostly software that has to be paid for. The only fair comparison at eye level is probably the NGINX web server: It is also free and offers even higher performance. In the meantime, there is also a paid Plus version of NGINX. This has extended support and special functions.
Both products has their pro and cons. However in term of subscription and pricing for a small office, this offered better ROI as the office didn't want to spend too much and have something relative easy to manage.
Apache web server helped us in building client applications without much investment in the underlying server configuration which gives us the ability to start on a new project quickly and upgrade its resources as and when needed.
Using software which is well-supported by a community of open source contributors makes tasks easy and affordable when need help since a couple of minutes on Google saves a couple of dollars every time and you don't need a specialized support person unless there is something significant needing to be changed.
