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."

Comments

Hard to believe

[bwt]

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?

Re:Hard to believe

[sab39]

Try reading the actual survey. The Ominous Cow Herd and the /. editor that posted this should have done the same thing, and realised that it's not so significant, but that would be asking way too much for /. :)

What it boils down to is that a couple of mega-hosting-companies that host thousands upon thousands of domains have made changes that have a disproportionate effect due to the sheer number of sites hosted on their systems.

The survey also shows results for "active domains" which are much more realistic, and while these still show a gain for Apache, it's much more modest and therefore more believable. But it doesn't make for such good headlines...

Stuart.

Re:Can't argue with the numbers, but...

[Da VinMan]

"But some people play this game only to build the best web server possible."

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 /. 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.

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.

The Virtuous Cycle

[cpeterso]

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.

Ah... look again

[stonewolf]

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 news

[Snafoo]

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.)