In the bad old days, a computer was a standalone thing. If you needed to get something onto the hard disk, you typed it in yourself, or you copied it from a floppy disk. Today the frontier between your computer and your internal network – and between your network and the Internet – has blurred so much that some computers can't even work without a connection to the outside world.

Behind many of the services you access online or on your local network is the venerable Apache web server. Apache has been around for two decades now, and for most of that time, it has been (and still is) the backbone of the Internet. Despite many cool alternatives, Apache is still the most used server out on the web, by a large margin.

Apache is also used as the backend for many intranet services. The web-based ERP you use in your office, the Linux-based multimedia server you enjoy at home, and the web interface you manage your database with probably all use Apache. It makes sense, then, to learn how to configure Apache to make it as efficient as possible.

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