Which Web Server/application Interface

This is my first post here and this sub-forum seems to be adequate for my question. If it is not, I apologize in advance.

I want to create a web application for an upcoming project of mine that has the potential to attract a large number of people. So the web application needs to be fast and secure at the same time.

I used PHP for minor projects for some time now, and although it is really efficient for quick web development, it _appears_ to me like a house of cards waiting to collapse. If you know how to use it properly, it can be acceptable, but there are still numerous security exploits in PHP itself that have surfaced over the last decade. Additionally, it tends to be quite slow and has a lot of bugs that aren't really security related, but can make your life hard. I've run test scripts (that I optimized for web deployment) on my own computer, and even on my own computer which is way faster (in terms of CPU speed, number of cores, RAM, and so on) than most servers, it runs slow--without any database access! And I honestly don't buy the "your server will spend most time in your database anyway, so don't worry about that" statements. I've tested it with databases that have millions of rows in them, and coded a test script that accesses the table and then calculates stuff from that and outputs it. If I comment out the database access the time needed to execute the script is only marginally reduced. I observed the same in my other projects. I also used Python and the problem seems to be the same.

Now, before the PHP/Python fanboy crowd yells at me: "Google uses Python and Wikipedia uses PHP, too". Yes, I know. But they have a lot of money to throw at the problem and can easily add new hardware if needed (Wikipedia alone has collected over 6m USD in the last year from donations). And a Wikipedia staff member I talked to some while ago told me that it's a miracle that Wikipedia is still running given that it is written in PHP with all its security problems (not my words).

So I thought: why not use a compiled language?

The obvious advantages would be that it is faster, and that I can leave out all the junk that is not needed in my case, thereby decreasing the chance of badly written code running in memory.

I have coded in C and C++ for a long time, including security-critical applications. So I absolutely know how hard it can be to write really secure applications, but I think it is also fair to say that I know how to minimize the risk of buffer overflows, validate user input properly, and so on. I often force myself to review my code some time later, in order to spot coding mistakes that you just won't see the first time. Additionally, I've created a neat string library around the standard library that makes string manipulation as easy as in PHP or Python.

So I continued my thinking: why not use C/C++ for your web applications and 'somehow' interface them with your web server?

And that's the problem--the 'somehow interface'. I don't know what to use that won't be deprecated in like 5-10 years from now. CGI seems to be quite okay, but I heard there's a huge overhead due to loading the executable into memory each time a user requests a page. FastCGI seems to be a better solution, but is not as widely supported.

My question is: What interface should I use if I want my web apps to be compiled? CGI, FastCGI, what else? The interface needs to be supported into the far future, it needs to be efficient and fast. And there's also one more important factor: time. Coding the application itself is an acceptable time loss, but if I can only run the app on a dedicated server and have to manage the whole server myself, this can become quite cumbersome. I'd really like to use a solution that can be run on a managed server.