In 1995, a group of webmasters began sharing patches for the abandoned NCSA HTTPd server and released the result as Apache. By 1996 it was the most popular web server on the internet, a position it held for about two decades. The Apache Group formalised itself as the Apache Software Foundation in 1999, which now hosts hundreds of projects.
Apache’s modules, .htaccess files and mod_php made it the default choice for shared hosting and the LAMP stack. Version 2.4, released in 2012, is still the current branch and receives regular security releases. Nginx has since overtaken it on busy sites, but Apache remains widely deployed.
