Category: Apache

Apache vs Nginx: A Tale of Two Web Servers

December 3, 2025

Apache and Nginx power a huge share of the modern web, but they were born in very different eras to solve very different problems. This article traces their histories from NCSA HTTPd and the C10k problem through to today’s hosting stacks, then compares their architectures, strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases.

Fixing Apache AH01328 “Line too long” with mod_substitute

October 15, 2025

Apache’s mod_substitute can choke on single-line AJAX/JSON payloads, throwing “AH01328: Line too long.” This guide shows how to scope the filter and bump the line-length limit (e.g., 100M) safely for admin-ajax.php.

How to Add a Custom HTTP Header to All Sites on a Plesk Server

July 16, 2025

Adding custom headers is a useful way to identify, trace, or control web traffic across a hosted environment. This guide walks through the process of adding the HTTP header X-Hosted-By: ExampleHost to all websites running on a Plesk server, across both nginx and Apache layers. Why Add a Custom Header? Custom HTTP headers can: Identify the infrastructure powering your site (e.g., for branding or tracing) Assist in diagnostics or security logging Be used for custom caching or CDN logic Step-by-Step: Add Header in nginx Step 1: Copy the nginx Template First, copy the default Plesk template into a custom directory:

cd /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/templates
mkdir -p custom/domain
cp default/domain/nginxDomainVirtualHost.php custom/domain/

cd /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/templates

mkdir -p custom/domain

cp default/domain/nginxDomainVirtualHost.php custom/domain/

Step 2: Edit the Template Open the copied file:

vi custom/domain/nginxDomainVirtualHost.php

1 2	vi custom/domain/nginxDomainVirtualHost.php

Locate the block that outputs header directives, such as:

<?php foreach ((array)$VAR->domain->physicalHosting->headers as list($name, $value)): ?>
    add_header <?=$VAR->quote([$name, $value])?>;
<?php endforeach ?>
<?php if ($VAR->server->xPoweredByHeader) : ?>
    add_header X-Powered-By PleskLin;
<?php endif ?>

<?php foreach ((array)$VAR->domain->physicalHosting->headers as list($name, $value)): ?>

add_header <?=$VAR->quote([$name, $value])?>;

<?php endforeach ?>

<?php if ($VAR->server->xPoweredByHeader) : ?>

add_header X-Powered-By PleskLin;

<?php endif ?>

Insert your custom header right after:

<?php /* CUSTOM HEADER START */ ?>
    add_header X-Hosted-By "ExampleHost" always;
<?php /* CUSTOM HEADER END */ ?>

<?php /* CUSTOM HEADER START */ ?>

add_header X-Hosted-By "ExampleHost" always;

<?php /* CUSTOM HEADER END */ ?>

Step 3: Rebuild nginx Configurations

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/httpdmng --reconfigure-all

1 2	/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/httpdmng --reconfigure-all

Step 4: Restart nginx

systemctl restart nginx

1 2	systemctl restart nginx

Step-by-Step: Add Header in Apache Step 1: Copy the Apache Template

Protecting Website Search Function from Excessive Bot Traffic

February 1, 2025

Search functionality is a critical part of any website, helping users quickly find the information they need. However, excessive bot traffic—especially from search engine crawlers—can put a strain on your server resources, slow down performance, and even lead to increased hosting costs. One common issue is search engines aggressively crawling internal search pages, which are not meant for indexing. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to prevent unwanted bot traffic, particularly from Bingbot, using .htaccess rules to return a 404 error for specific URLs. Why Restrict Bots from Crawling Search Pages? Search engine bots, like Googlebot and Bingbot, continuously crawl websites to index their content. While this is generally beneficial for SEO, unrestricted crawling of search results pages can: Waste server resources: Bots continuously hitting dynamic search pages increase load on your database and web server. Index unnecessary pages: Internal search results don’t provide valuable standalone content and can

Get Top 10 User Agents

May 14, 2024

Extract a list of the top user agents from an Apache format log file and sort in descending order by number of occurrences:

awk -F\" '{print $6}' access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n | head -20

1	awk -F\" '{print $6}' access_log \| sort \| uniq -c \| sort -r -n \| head -20

Results similar to this:

  94786 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.75 Safari/537.36
  68390 Amazon CloudFront
  36131 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
  19725 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  11865 Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36
  11428 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)
  10056 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)
   6311 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
....

94786 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.75 Safari/537.36

68390 Amazon CloudFront

36131 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0

19725 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

11865 Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36