Hiawatha

Spec sheet

Purpose

Hiawatha is an advanced, secure webserver designed for Unix.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Platforms

The download page lists a MacOS X package, Debian/Ubuntu repository options, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports; it says the Windows package is compiled via Cygwin and is not recommended for production unless tested.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Security

It supports TLS via mbed TLS and offers protection against SQL injection, XSS, CSRF/XSRF and DoS attacks.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

License

The webserver is distributed under GNU GPL version 2.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Founded

2002Read 28 Sep 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Access control

Access to websites can be controlled with Basic or Digest HTTP authentication or by IP address.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

CGI and FastCGI

Hiawatha supports CGI scripts and FastCGI, including load balancing, and includes a CGI wrapper for security.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Free monitor

The Hiawatha Monitor is free.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Intended use

The maker says Hiawatha's lightweight design makes it suitable for older hardware or embedded systems.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Monitoring

Hiawatha Monitor provides one interface to track the performance and security of Hiawatha webservers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Monitoring requirements

Hiawatha Monitor is a PHP web application with a MySQL backend and requires cron to periodically download statistics.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Performance

Features for speeding up websites include internal caching, keep-alive connections, request pipelining and GZip Content-Encoding.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Protocols

Hiawatha supports HTTP/2 and IPv6.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Reverse proxy

Its built-in reverse proxy can integrate other web solutions or act as an application firewall in front of other webservers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

URL rewriting

The URL toolkit can rewrite URLs, and predefined rules are available for popular PHP CMS applications.Read 8 Oct 2026 · hiawatha.leisink.net

Plans and prices

Every Hiawatha plan and price →

Where Specifiction places it

• Web Server Software#8 of 368.1