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August Netcraft Results - Apache up 6%, MS IIS down 6%
An Onimous Cow Herd writes "Augusts Netcraft Web survey results are now out. This month's results show a dramatic upsurge of nearly 6% for Apache and a corresponding drop for MS IIS! At this point, Apache's decline has dramatically reversed, regaining the ground it lost to IIS starting mid-2001 and currently Apache's market share stands the highest since Netscraft started their monthly surveys."
It seems to me a hard thing to believe that a swing that big could happen in a month. Anybody have any explaination for how it happened.
Maybe people are finally deploying the new version of Apache? Or is this just sampling error?
From Netcraft's site:
Around the Net
Microsoft loses around 6% share this month, as register.com continues to fluctuate between using a Windows and Linux front end, and homestead.com , which originally based its business model on support from advertising, cleared away over a million sites. Homestead recently raised $5M from its investors to assist its transition to a paid for serivces model. To complete a bad news month for Microsoft's share of the survey, Reuters reports that the Federal Trade Commission will investigate the relationship between Verisign and Interland with respect to marketing domain names. The NSI domain parking system hosted at Interland is the other large repository of parked sites on the Microsoft platform. Earlier in the year large numbers of sites were reaped at Namezero, which had a controversial relationship with NSI regarding reselling domain names.
"But some people play this game only to build the best web server possible."
/. look at the Apache numbers as some sort of "is Microsoft dead?" meter. They seem to think that if Apache can maintain a big enough market share for long enough, that it will either kill Microsoft or make Microsoft irrelevant. There's no doubt that it could hurt Microsoft's a teeny bit, but that's about it.
I suppose it's debatable, but I'll argue that market share has nothing to do with having the best product.
I believe that many people on
But don't worry too much. If you select web servers based on how many people make how much money off you, then you can still choose (what I presume to be) the leader by that criteria.
Exactly! And what I'm saying here is that Apache may or may not be a valuable part of many companies' mission critical applications. To me, that's valuable. Just knowing how many functioning instances of Apache are out there isn't too valuable for most businesses in my opinion.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
While one may argue that a web composed of Apache servers is more secure than a web composed of IIS, it's better yet to have a plurality of servers. I know we're not down to one or even two servers, yet. But we should keep in mind that "World Domination" by a web server (or even OS) is not a particularly good outcome.
It's unfortunate that the computing industry has this completely stupid "One Leader" mindset. First it was IBM, then Microsoft, and even if Linux is a more benign "One Leader" than the other two, it's the "One" in there that's flawed.
We need to re-orient our heads a bit, and IMHO the Linux camp is almost as guilty as the Windows camp. Mitigating factor, at least the Linux camp begrudges *BSD the right to exist, but is it any better than the Windows/Mac relationship?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The emergence of a de facto standard is inevitable. It's called the Virtuous Cycle. Users and vendors are more likely to use and invest in the market leader, which increases is market lead. Rinse and repeat. For better or worse, that's why Windows rules the desktop today. It's easier and cheaper to just support one standard.
cpeterso
If you look down the page for the number of active websites instead of the number of total websites you see that Apache gained 1.43% and IIS lost 0.51%
There is a lot of difference between active sites and "parked" inactive sites. On the netcraft site you can find a good discussion of the difference between total sites and active sites.
The 6% swing seems to be the result of some major web parking sites switching to Apache.
I love to see open source advance, but we need to be as honest as possible in selecting statistics to present.
Stonewolf
Other holds steady at 12%.
Although not as popular as Apache and IIS, Other offers an incredibly scalable and diverse development platform; and although its share may wax and wane over time, it never drops to zero: In Other surveys of Other products and markets, not once has any Other competitor been successful at completely eliminating this tenacious brand. (Some Independent checks by Some Independent regulatory body ensured that the numbers remained accurate, although that Some-body could not be reached for comment.)
- undoware.ca
I believe that many people on /. look at the Apache numbers as some sort of "is Microsoft dead?" meter.
Actually, I think of it as more of a "has Microsoft taken over everything in the known universe?" meter... or maybe a "is the idea of Free Software in the business world actually tenable" meter.
Apache, much like the old BSD TCP/IP, is one of those shining success stories in the Free Software world, so I think it's all right if people cheer when it does well in a fluffy survey with pretty graphs. Of course I guess it would be pretty damn silly to have a Netcraft-style survey of networking protocol suites, but I would still cheer to see that TCP went from 99.87% to 99.88% this month :)