To lighttpd or not to lighttpd
So for 3 months lighttpd is now in the top 5 list of netcraft statistics.
I actually tried lighttpd before using LiteSpeed-Webserver which is a commercial product (with a free standard-version) but for my use-case superior to use. Maybe they are on par performance-wise, I don’t know and didn’t do enough benchmarks to tell but the usability is totally different.
According to netcraft there are more than a million domains hosted on lighttpd now but why is there no Webinterface to configure it? Do the users see this as useless? I don’t really like to be depending on SSH-access for changing something in my webserver configuration when I’m on the road and missing input validation like a webinterface could do.
Also why is there no support to use .htaccess-files or at least search for .htaccess-files and convert them to something lighttpd likes? LiteSpeed supports .htaccess files with a cache so that it isn’t as much a performance hit as it was previously.
I would be really afraid of opening lots of holes while switching to lighttpd because I secured a ton of directories with simply a “Deny from all” in .htaccess-files and sometimes “Basic Authentication”.
Why does it have to be so hard? 
[...] as I wrote in an earlier post there is one feature I’d badly miss in lighttpd and which really keeps me from switching: [...]