Microsoft created their Personal Web Server because web sites created using their non-standard FrontPage technology couldn't be previewed using just a regular web browser, you actually needed to run a web server on your personal computer for them to work. In the process, this little hack-job introduced some well-known security problems to systems running it. If you want to run a personal web site, or a little tool to process and serve up web pages for you, there are other servers available, for little or no money, by programmers who'll actually read and respond to your questions and requests. Self-serving sales pitch: If you don't want to deal with the hassle of running your own web server, my company offers dependable web-hosting service at reasonable rates.
	Xitami is a great choice if you want a fast and powerful web server to run on Windows, and don't want to spend any money. You can probably even use an old, kind-of-slow machine to run it on, because it's very efficient. The standard version is free open-source, or for a little cash you can upgrade to Xitami Pro to add secure-sockets features. It's also available for Linux, BeOS, OS/2, and VMS.
	Omnicron OmniHTTPd is a fast-n-small web server for Windows, making it good for personal or small business uses (but it can't do secure e-commerce). They offer a basic version 1 of the program for free, or the inexpensive "Pro" version 2 which adds a lot of useful features and runs on Windows NT as well as Win95/98.
	Sambar is another free server for Windows and Unix-like systems, offering easy web-browser-based adminstration, and an excellent interface for programmers to extend the capabilities of the server themselves. And like many free servers, you can buy a licence to activate some of its more advanced features (DNS, FTP, mail, DHCP).
	Savant is a free server that includes a nice mix of support for the latest standards, easy installation and administration, but without bogging the thing down with high-end features that a personal web site would never need. It limits itself how much horsepower it will use up, making it good for running in the background on a Windows workstation.
	MiniPortal is an inexpensive commercial product that includes current stable versions of the free Apache server and Perl scripting language, plus support for FrontPage extensions (if they're installed on your system), in an easy-to-install package for Windows. It starts simple, but if you roll up your sleeves, you can get it to do anything Apache and Perl can (within the limits of Windows). The dynamic-DNS-updating option would be attractive to home sites running on DSL/cable connections with dynamic IP addresses.
	BadBlue is a server designed to facilitate file-sharing via a web server. It's easy to set up and small enough to run on an ordinary Windows workstation, but includes some powerful features like support for Perl and PHP. It's free for personal and charity use, and very inexpensive for other users. The Enterprise Edition adds text searching and live translation of shared MS-Office documents into standard HTML for visitors to browse, also an affordable price.
	Viking is a fairly new product (still on version 1.x), but its users say it's already quite reliable. It provides Windows systems with a nearly-complete suite of internet services, including: mail, dns, mailing-list, ftp, finger, caching proxy, nntp, firewall, telnet, web e-mail, and multiple-domain web service. (Plans are for free, standard, and deluxe versions including various subsets of these.)
	Inframail is a combination mail/web/ftp/news/gopher server, available in different versions with varying capabilities, all of them inexpensive. Although it won't beat any of the "best of breed" dedicated applications, it does surprisingly much (e.g. supporting IMAP, ESMTP, and SSL). For both Windows and Unix-like systems. Evil Soho, Kindle Online, Freddie's Club of Fife WA.
	AnalogX SimpleServer:WWW is just what its name implies, a very simple web server, small enough to fit on a diskette (even an old low-density floppy), trivially easy to install and run, and free. It can be useful as a local - even portable - test/demo server for sites using server-side DOS/Win CGI. (A similar MP3-streaming server is also available.)
	Serving is yet another simple, small, freeware web server. It's not quite as tiny as SimpleServer, but provides some additional functionality, particularly the ability to read and write to simple database files using built-in server-side PascalScript and forms processing, mail handling, and generating images on the fly.
	Falcon Web Server aims to provide similar functionality to Microsoft's business-class Internet Information Server, with support for ISAPI and WinCGI, but on a mere desktop computer. The key word there is "aims": it actually lacks quite a few of IIS's key features, and others are only partially implemented, but if you don't expect it to live up to its goal, you may be satisfied with what it actually does. A version with support for secure sockets is also available .
	TinyWeb doesn't offer many customisation options or high-end features, but it takes very modest resources, keeps logs, and supports Perl and compiled CGI. You won't even notice it's there (partly because it's invisible when it's running). A version with secure-sockets support is also available. It's free, and the Delphi source code is even included.
	MacHTTP was the first web server developed for the Mac OS, and even runs on some of the old 68K Macs (as long as they have System 7 or later, 4MB RAM, and, y'know, a hard drive and a TCP/IP connection). It's still undergoing development, gradually evolving but with an eye on keeping the system requirements low.
	Robin Hood is a free open source, web server for BeOS (both intel and PPC). Although there are better, more powerful servers for BeOS (such as Apache), this one is easy to configure, and it holds up rather nicely, even under moderately-heavy traffic (for a personal web site). Even easier to install and maintain is PoorMan, which is bundled with BeOS.
	Small HTTP Server is not a polished product, either in terms of its name, setup, interface, documentation, or even the developers usage of English. But the coding efficiency of its lone Russian programmer is impressive, supporting forms, Perl/PHP/exe CGI (with external parsers), SSI, proxying, DNS, virtual hosts, FTP, POP3/SMTP, and more. The program size has swelled in recent versions to... nearly 100KB (small enough to fit on a 1980-vintage single-sided, single-density 5.25" floppy). Well worth the modest registration fee he asks.
	If none of these has the features you want, or you've outgrown them, it's time to look at one of the more powerful web servers out there. They need a bit more horsepower (like their own machine to run on), and they're a bit more work to set up and maintain, but the good news is that they won't (necessarily) break the bank, and they'll let you do anything the big boys can... because they're what the big boys use.

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