Apache has been around since 1995 and is the main alternative to Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) web hosting technology on the Windows platform. When it comes to the Internet as a whole, Apache may actually be the preferred web hosting technology, since most professional web-hosting operations use versions of Apache on the Linux operating system to host commercial client websites.

The popularity of Apache can be directly attributed to three things. For one, the program's general simplicity and ease of use make basic web hosting extremely easy. Secondly, like Internet Explorer, Microsoft's IIS technology suffers and has suffered historically from the fact that it is directly linked into the Windows operating system. Apache is a standalone program, not patched into the OS on which it runs, and is also blessed with simple but effective security measures.