For personal projects I use Apache, not because of its performance characteristics, but because it's the most common and thus when I want to do something crazy

For personal projects I use Apache, not because of its performance characteristics, but because it's the most common and thus when I want to do something crazy I am most likely to find that someone else who uses it has already written up an explanation of how to do it. For development I also use the Django default/debug webserver a lot. For work I use GWS but I suspect that is not helpful to you ;-)