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Netcraft Claims Apache Now Runs 2/3rds Of The Web
Mr Bill writes "According to NetCraft the Apache web server now owns over 2/3rds of the web. The jump of 2.8% since last month is mostly due to a number of large domain parking sites switching back to Apache from IIS. 'During 2001 and the first half of 2002 several companies hosting very large numbers of hostnames including Webjump, Namezero, Homestead, register.com and Network Solutions migrated to Microsoft-IIS. Subsequently these businesses have either failed, significantly changed their business model, or reverted to their previous platform, and Microsoft-IIS share is now in line with its long term pre-summer 2001 level of around 20%.' See the full report here."
Numbers that are much harder to get but would be significantly more valuable would be the fraction of web traffic handled by the type of server. Just because I have a hosting company that has 3 sites doesn't mean that I'm getting traffic in the same amount that some other individuals. And MS(make that M$ so I don't get modded down) would tell you that there servers are deployed on the larger installations, the ones that need to higher performance.
(And, I'd expect that if we looked at a graph of traffic, you'd see the GWS getting a significant share.)
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Netcraft really needs to drop the NCSA line on the charts that don't stretch back before 2000.
The only thing that straight orange line at 0 does is give the Sun ONE guys something to point and laugh at. And it looks like they need it.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Apache isn't quite as much of a monocrop as it might seem at first. While a newly discovered security hole is likely to affect a large proportion of the world's web servers, differences in how Apache is linked and loaded will mean that any exploit is going to be specific to one operating system. For example, there was an Apache/FreeBSD worm some time back; the security hole existed in all (unpatched) Apache installations, but the worm was only able to exploit it on FreeBSD.
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It might help a bit, but not a lot. Web servers that belong to a domain, say www.slashdot.com, are counted here, but when you have millions of home machines worldwide still running an open web service on windows, that can overwhelm the statistics.
.com
66% of 'real' websites may be apache driven, but when it comes to viral infection, Joe Normal's home windows box on his cable connection counts just as much an infectable web server as the business down the road that runs a real
Whether this makes Apache's percentage larger or smaller, I have no idea there either. I think that the claim as written is inaccurate.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
But IIS usage is NOT going down though! The netcraft graph is a graph of relative usage of each system and adds up to 100%. If you look at the bottom the linked page at the second graph, you can see that IIS usage hasn't decreased at all - it's just that Apache usage has gone up quite a bit recently (ie, there are more total servers tested by Netcraft).
Read what the previous AC said. He's Magnus from Netcraft. Netcraft reads the HTTP server signature. Compare the Security Space October results by server sig and by over all share. (Looks like November is not yet up).
Besides stability (yes, non-Debian users, older is better), a bug issue is the lack of PHP support in Apache 2.0. Netcraft reports that PHP is the number one module in Apache. Sites that need PHP will stay with Apache 1.3 until PHP is tried tested and true in Apache 2.0.
And to repeat an earlier AC post by Magnus, it's Netcraft with a lower case "c".
The monopoly driven upgrade cycle is in reference to everything IIS forces on your company.
Unless their is some version of IIS that runs on OS X,Linux,and other OSes that I've missed...
I'd just add, that FreeBSD does the same thing.
When in doubt, go to the library. - Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
It has a monopoly on Windows web servers.
What a bizarre statement. Isn't that like saying RedHat has a monopoly on RedHat Linux servers? Or Debian has monopoly on Debian GNU/Linux servers?
Je ne parle pas francais.
That's certainly a monopoly. There are other, free options, but "nobody does" so it is a monopoly.
This is why I don't agree with the Windows monopoly concept. We all know there are easily a hundred other free operating systems out there. Plus many more that aren't free but aren't from Microsoft. If Microsoft is the operating system of choice, even if the choice is watered down since most people get Windows free (or not free but seemingly so while paying for it in OEM costs) and prefer it, even if that choice is made out of laziness, how is that forcing their hand?
The simple truth nobody in the open source community wants to think about is this: Most computer users today don't give a damn about Microsoft's monopoly, and even if their computer didn't come with Windows and even if they were informed of Linux, BSD, and other alternatives, they would still CHOOSE to go buy a copy of Windows and install it. Rant and rave, like it or not, Windows is the operating system most people in the world would choose. They don't need to strong arm anybody. I'm not saying they don't, I'm saying blaming their current success on that is a piss poor excuse. The truth is, they have a product that does what many people want.
Very insightful post.
A little bit of greasing of palms is a fairly common business practice. MS have probably seen that all that did, rather than
persuade the rest of the world to move over to IIS, was cost MS
money. So what comes next? I reckon the future will be MS playing
dirtier. They'll buy up companies which have trivial web patents,
and will sue every hosting company under the sun for "serving dynamically created content based on the user's prior browsing history" or something inane like that. (I made that one up.)
They have to start playing dirty now. Therefore they will.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Until there is an announcement on the PHP homepage stating that PHP is totally stable under Apache 2, and that moving to Apache 2 will offer far greater performance, I don't see the ratio changing in the near future. The last advice I read was "don't use mod_php under Apache 2", and haven't heard anything to the contrary recently.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
If you switch from Windows on your Desktop to Linux, you lose access to many applications only available under Windows. Those apps cannot be easily ported. In addition to losing functionality, you lose interoperability, because many of those applications provided access to data and other resources.
So yeah, I'd agree Microsoft has no monopoly in the web services arena, but I'd disagree about the operating system. In the late 1800s you had a choice of oil supplier, but thanks to Standard Oil's corrupt contracts with railroad companies, the only affordable oils were their's. Throughout the 20th Century, you could always use mail, radio, and a host of other services instead of the Bell System, to communicate. But that hardly meant they weren't a monopoly. "Choices" that are effectively worthless for the majority of people do not undermine a monopoly.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Apache is not really a monoculture atall, not compared to IIS... If you encounter a machine running IIS you can pretty much guarantee it`s running on an x86 machine running windows, it might, but this is a 1/1000000 chance or something, be running on windows on an alpha, mips or ppc... but this isnt possible for any version above 5.0
However, with Apache, it could be running on any one of many OS`s, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HPUX, AIX for instance, and on many different hardware architectures.
This is a good reason for promoting systems such as FreeBSD, OSX, and the other risc systems... If the entire world standardises on x86/linux for their webservers, especially a single distribution, then it would be no better than a windows monoculture.
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OK - I'm slightly wrong.
/. comments - you'll see that graph is misleading many people on here. Many users seem to think that IIS usage is falling rapidly, when in fact it's nearly the highest it's ever been!
MS had 4.92 million sites last month, and it's 4.91 million this month (1.06% down) but my point still stands - it's mainly the fact that Apache has gone up from 13.52 million to 14.37 million active sites ( a gain 846294) that makes the graph show a swing from Apache to Linux. It's not really a change from Apache TO IIS - its mainly just loads more Apache sites. The fall in IIS usage is so insignificant that it doesn't even register on that graph!
If you read the other
Looking at the second graph, gives you a much clearer idea of what's going on - an obvous 'spike' in Apache users - while IIS usage doesn't change by a statistically significant amount (just the usual wobble perhaps).
A few months more data will be needed to draw any conclusions on whether or not IIS usage is actually significantly falling.
I don't think things like the Blaster worm have help Microsoft's image where security is concerned, but favourable independent reports of the security of the new Windows 2003 platform should balance that out in the long term.
I guess the numbers have some interest, but I'd be far more interested in what they're doing with their web servers. On the assumption that serving flat HTML is a minority interest, what, more significantly, are they using for their application development? Perl? PHP? Java? C?
One of the main problems with IIS is that its single-process, multi-threaded operation makes it very vulnerable to threadlocks and memory leakage by various ancillary software components (database drivers, Active X stuff, etc). Debugging these problems is next-to-impossible, particularly for someone who's chosen to use IIS largely because of a familiarity with Visual Basic.
I would not *a priori* expect threading in Apache 2.0 to work any better than IIS if it's working with, say, PHP into which you can build a myriad of library functions many of which have a single-threaded heritage.
So, if users are moving to Apache in droves because they've found a reliable rapid development environment for multi-threaded web applications, then I'd be interested to know what (apart from Apache) was involved.
After all, Apache (like IIS) is fundamentally no more than a dispatcher for HTTP requests. It's producing the responses that causes the trouble!
I think that it's more significant to note that even though it already has the majority share, Apache use is growing faster than any other server. This means that when somebody decides on a new server, more often than not, it's Apache that is chosen. Microsoft seems to be fighting a losing battle here. It's also interesting to note that they group a number of different Microsoft web servers together, whilst they separate the Apache users into different groups.
Why would their margins be lower because Linux is cheaper for the customer? The margin is the difference between what the customer pays and what it costs them to provide it. If Linux is cheaper for them, their margins can very well be higher for Linux, even though it is cheaper for the customer.
This way, everybody benefits (except for Microsoft).
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Just because many don't complain doesn't mean they're not being disadvantaged. I could steal 10 pence a day from you and you probably wouldn't notice. Does that mean my theft would be permissible?
Impartial, informed observers have been saying for a very long time that Microsoft are a monopoly and illegally maintain this. That a major customer of theirs (HP, I believe) felt strongly enough that they disliked dealing with Microsoft sufficiently to go on record as stating that if they had alternative suppliers, they would deal with them instead, is surely a strong indication of Microsoft's nature. As is Microsoft feeling able to pressure IBM into dropping OS/2 and later SmartSuite through preferential pricing on Windows. Surely if there existed a sufficiently realistic competitive market in computer software, such tactics would have merely driven up sales of OS/2? It's not like it wasn't getting good reviews at the time.
Microsoft are a monopoly in the legal sense, and there can be no doubt that they have significantly abused this to the detriment of both consumers and the industry as a whole to anyone who followed the trial. That users are too apathetic and uninformed to understand they have lost out is not a defence against the monopoly charge, merely and indictment of the popular media and Microsoft's few remaining competitors.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
If anything, apache is closer to a monopoly (though both IIS and apache are far from it)
Monopoly != popularity. Monopoly is taking market share by force rather than by normal market behavior. If Apache had extensions that didn't work right for any other browser besides, say, Mozilla, you might have something.
Please turn the next page in your pamphlet and post accordingly.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Wouldn't a breakup by a measure of the size in bytes of content served by the various web servers make a much more realistic figure?
I mean, if the traffic logs and stats are not available for all the sites around, surely, a measure of the size of the content would give one a fair idea of where the heavy weights really lie?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Monopoly != popularity. Monopoly is taking market share by force rather than by normal market behavior.
No, monopoly means "exclusive control by one group of the manufacture, or production, or selling of a comodity" whether that monopoly was gained by the popularity of the product or by "force" is irrelevant. The behaviour you are talking about isn't "monopoly" it is the abuse of a monopoly, or in anti-trust law "unfair business practices". Also, those business practices are only "unfair" IF you have a monopoly. So Microsoft was perfectly fine writing those "lock in" contracts with OEM's before they had a monopoly. It was perfectly fair to sign exclusive contracts in an attempt to lock out the competition and gain market-share. It is even fine for them to have become a monopoly, but once they are they are forbiden such practices which used to be perfectly legal.
Microsoft does have overwhelming marketshare, their network of exclusive sales contracts, when it was fully in force, probably made them a monopoly by virtue of the fact that they had something close enough to exclusive control of the sale of operating systems. I think such a virtual monopoly was sufficient for anti-trust law to kick in and forbid their use of otherwise legal practices. But strictly speaking Microsoft isn't a monopoly in the sense that DeBeers or OPEC are, or Standard Oil was.
Monoculture? How so? I happen to work for a company with VERY close ties to MS and they won't let me run Linux... so I run Apache, MySQL and PHP on a windows machine. Works great and I never have any down time.
The key phrase here is cross platform compatibility. That is something that Microsoft has yet to learn.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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It can be compiled for multiple architectures. (Opteron, PPC, MIPS, etc.)
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It can be compiled with different configuration settings.
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It can be compiled using different compilers.
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It can be compiled using different compiler options.
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It can be compiled on different operating systems. (Solaris, BSD, Linux, OS X, etc.)
While in some sense Apache may be a monoculture, you can clearly see from what I've just stated that in another sense it is far from a monoculture. At least in the sense that matters, in the sense of biological diversity. It is unlikely that one single virus is going to wipe out all Apache installations.On the other hand, a sophisticated virus could be written based on some as yet undiscovered exploit that tries the attack for each binary variation of Apache. Using platform X, Y, and Z binary code. Compiled using P or Q compiler with A, B or C option settings.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Now, an Open Source system gains an overwhelming market share, and this is considered a good thing???
Probably one of the reasons Apache is getting so large market shares is, that it never had the problems seen with other products with too large market shares. If major problems ever turns up with Apache, we will probably quickly see a fork. Until that happens just be happy with one free product with an excelent record.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?