Netcraft Survey Updated

The latest survey is out and ready for reading from Netcraft. There's some interesting commentary in regards to Code Red, and its effects on web usage. One of the things that I found most interesting was the data showing that while the number of sites hosted by Apache continues to grow, the number of physical webservers running some variety of Windows is about half of the total. Worth checking out.

Comments

Re:MS Trickery

[sphealey]

Maybe I have been taking too much acid in the last couple of days (Wow, look! A rainbow Tux!), but I think this is part of Microsoft's plan. If it takes 2 MS machines to replace every Apache machine MS will be sitting pretty. All they need is a few pointy haired bosses who are naive enough to spend more money for more machines. Then they can say they have the most marketshare

That's not exactly a new idea for Microsoft: it was one of their key tactics in the battle against Novell. Top brass would be sold on how much less expensive NT was than Netware. When all was said and done, 1 Netware sever with two support techs would be replaced by 15 NT servers and 10 support techs. But it happened over a period of time and no one understood what was really going on.

Of course, those 10 new techs then became evangalists for pushing more Microsoft stuff, and the rest is history...

sPh

Systematic over counting of Microsoft servers?

[Simon Brooke]

From the document:

Of the 80,000 ip addresses no longer running Microsoft-IIS, only around 2,000 are now running a competing web server.

This kind of implies to me that at least 78,000 of the machines Netcraft have been counting as IIS Web servers were in fact just machines on which IIS had been loaded by default, and were never serving any real content anyway. If that's true of 78,000, how many more is it true of? In other words, are Netcraft systematically overcounting IIS by counting all machines with IIS running whether they are in fact serving any real content or not? Likewise, how many of the 'Apache' servers counted are in fact just 'out of the box' Linux installs with no real content?