Features

Access control

Control the access to your websites via Basic or Digest HTTP authentication or by IP address.

CGI / FastCGI

Execution of CGI scripts. Hiawatha supports the FastCGI protocol, including load balancing, for improved CGI performance. A CGI-wrapper is included for better CGI security.

Internet Protocol version 6

The support for IPv6 makes Hiawatha ready for the future.

Monitoring

Keep track of all your webservers via the Hiawatha Monitor, a PHP application that communicates with your webserver to collection information about bandwidth usage, number of requests, errors and attacks.

Via the CommandChannel, you can get more detailed information of and control a single webserver.

Security

Security is one of the key features of this webserver. Besides support for SSL (via mbed TLS), Hiawatha offers protection against SQL injections, Cross-site Scripting (XSS), Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) and DoS attacks. Banning of bad behaving clients and limiting CGI runtime are examples of Hiawatha's unique security features.

Speed

Hiawatha supports several techniques to make your websites fast, like internal caching, keep-alive connection, request pipelining and a unique support for GZip Content-Encoding (read the manual for more information).

Reverse proxy

Via Hiawatha's built-in reverse proxy, you can easily integrate other web solutions or use Hiawatha as an application firewall to protect other webservers.

URL rewriting

Via Hiawatha's URL toolkit, you can rewrite every URL according to the need of your CMS / framework. For most popular PHP CMS applications, pre-defined rewrite rules are available.