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."

Comments

Not necessarily a good measurement

[taliver]

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.)

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 .com

Re:good

[nmg196]

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).

Re:OpenSSL...

[Przepla]

Indeed, but:

However, relying on version numbers to determine the number of vulnerable OpenSSL sites is flawed because vendors backport security patches. So a site using OpenSSL on a Red Hat 9 system will likely report itself as OpenSSL 0.9.7a even though it isn't vulnerable to any of the issues mentioned and the situation is similar for SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, and most of the Linux distributions. Additionally, many of the vendor distributions of Apache have recently started supressing all the extra module information by default, so newer distributions (ones that are not vulnerable) are less likely to be listed.

I'd just add, that FreeBSD does the same thing.

All that shows is apathy

[GregWebb]

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.