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I still use FCGI. FCGI works a lot like CGI; it loads programs when a request comes in, and the programs deal with the request. But it's much higher performance, because it doesn't have to freshly load the target program each time.

FCGI is an orchestration system. It starts up more worker processes if there are more requests, up to some limit it figures out by itself. If there are few requests, some of the worker processes get an end of file notification and exit. If a worker process crashes, it loads a fresh copy. Little or no human attention required. One of my systems has been up for 1788 days now.

FCGI works fine with Go programs, Python programs, etc. If you use Go, you can get performance reasonably close to what the hardware can do. Until you get to the point that you're renting additional servers as load increases, you don't need more than that for most applications.

You can run FCGI on some cheap shared hosting systems. Why pay more?

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package main import ( "database/sql" "net/http" "net/http/fcgi" ) // // Called by FCGI for each request // func (sv FastCGIServer) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) { body := make([]byte, 5000) // buffer for body, which should not be too big if req.Body != nil { len, _ := req.Body.Read(body) // body of HTTP request bodycontent := body[0:len] // take correct part of buffer Handlerequest(sv, w, bodycontent, req) // handle request } } // Run FCGI server func main() { sv := new(FastCGIServer) fcgi.Serve(nil, sv) } // Handlerequest -- handle one request from a client func Handlerequest(sv FastCGIServer, w http.ResponseWriter, bodycontent []byte, req *http.Request) { // GENERATE REPLY CONTENT HERE w.WriteHeader(statuscode) // internal server error w.Write(content) // report error as text ***TEMP*** }