Hi

I'm learning to build an e-commerce style web site based on PHP and MySQL.

I wanted some opinions (and facts) about the best web server to use in this case? in terms of security, reliability, performance, flexibility and any other advantages/disadvantages which may apply.

Thanks for your answers

For something to run PHP with MySQL. I'd recommend Apache. IIS can do it too, but Apache fits in better. Should you run into problems, you'll find far more people in the Apache/PHP community than a IIS/PHP community.

Pretty much all ISPs that provide PHP support do so in a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) set up. Besides, it's very easy to set up Apache with PHP.

Tomcat can be a generic Webserver, but isn't really meant to be. Not in a production environement anyway. It is primarily a JSP/Servlet engine that can also act as a web server. Most people use it in conjunction with Apache, just like you want to use PHP with Apache.

Both, Apache and IIS are reliable. As for performance, the differences here would be only academic. Also, if all you want to do is serve php docs, then I'm not sure what you'd be looking for in terms of flexibility.

Both are good servers, many of the differences are subjective. But the main one is for IIS you do need windows, and it is more resource hungry than Apache. It has also been quite insecure in the past, but they seem to have gotten their act together now.