Slashdot Mirror
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."
...and great for Apache. The underlying message seems to be that switching from Apache to IIS will either cause your company to fail outright, or at best cost you a huge chunk of resources while you switch to and from. That fact that Network Solutions is on the list is even better, because for many managers and users NetSol is *the* .com company, and if they can't make IIS work...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Netcraft seems to show every site that I've looked at running Apache 1.3.x, and none of them running Apache 2.0.x. Is this just Netcraft being weird in attempting to determine what version of Apache a server is running (or perhaps an equivalence in transmitted data between 1.3.x and 2.0.x), or a more significant sign of the "stability" that major servers require?
Luckily many people use different Apache versions or even platforms and certainly different modules, i.e., mod-perl or php so this isn't as bad for a risk factor. I would still like to see more variety and thus hopefully better security.
See my journal, I write things there
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.mi
They could do a lot with the numbers they already have that could be more insightful: - Show statistics by type of domain (.org, .com, .net, etc.)
- Show statistics about known companies/orgnisations that would be of interest to users (Forbes 500 companies, IT companies)
Maybe some kind of statistical tool can be added to Apache (perhaps as a module) that can be optionally loaded that allows netcraft and similar sites to poll Apache and get interesting information like: hits, max load, throughput, type of machine it's running on...
What do you then incorporate it into?
'Other' perhaps?
Incidentally, it's not 0. Oxford Brookes Univesity in the UK still use it, hilariously.
It would have been interesting to know which platform these webservers were running on, and if the host OS has been replaced too.
Which brings up the question why they are replacing their systems. Is it because IIS has a security history? If so, they did it for the wrong reasons, because the same can be said about Apache (go check bugtraq if you think i'm a troll). OTOH, if they replaced IIS to get rid of Windows, I can only be happy about. And so will the rest of the Slashdot crowd.
Btw, can someone explain to me the uprise in ISS use between May 2001 and August 2001 (or even till Feb 2002)?
It seems odd that the two largest parking hosts switched away from IIS at roughly the same time, when they also changed to IIS around the same time too. Maybe Microsoft made them an IIS offer they couldn't refuse, but have since changed that policy.
The yarn goes that MS products are not so badly written, that IS II is no worse that apache, that outlook is no worse than XXXX, its just that windows runs on 95% of the worlds computers so its a target and when its infected it gets noticed.
this apache story sort of gives a lie to this. if it runs 80% of the web servers it is the largest target by definition. Of course it does get attacked but you dont hear about this being a viral thing, spreading throught the mono crop.
I guess one can counter this argument by saying that bussinesses that run web servers maintain their patches better thsn the devil spawned endusers. But this doesn't really wash. If bussinesses had to patch as often as Windows users did they would be screaming bloody murder since while it only costs the end user free time, it cost the bussinesses actual operating expesnes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Lots of the _really_ big sites don't use Apache or IIS but use things like IBM_HTTP_Server (which, to be fair, IS Apache) with a Websphere backend. Also those really big site are all load balanced, portalled etc, so its hard to determin what is truely doing the serving.
Apache doesn't seem to suffer from the Monoculture problems that MS has... But I guess apache hasn't reached a true monoculture yet... But it would seem to \me that IIS could be a dying horse..
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
When I hosted some of my earlier sites, web hosting resellers were advocating Windows hosting. They charged more for it, and also most of the technical help they had was for Windows and IIS ...
... Finally one of the ladies confided ... "My techies are going nuts just keeping up with the patches after patches .. so please, go for Linux .... please .."
... .but I think very widespread ..
After the worm season of Microsoft, I actually had the same resellers begging me not to buy Windows hosting but go for Linux, even though it was cheaper (and hence their margins lower). Most of them were putting forward the reasoning that it was cheaper (but that was never a selling point earlier) and they said that there are so many free goodies available with it
It's anecdotal
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
...apache will spread even farther. i do a lot of web service programming myself, and i have to say that the axis project maintained by a fraction of the apache group made my life a whole lot easier. i don't think that a similar framework exists in the microsoft world (yeah, i know there is .NET, but i mean in the "real" java web service world that is truly portable cross platform)
".Sig Stealer" was here
Where I work we've slowly migrated from extremely reliable but very expensive HP hardware (running HP-UX) to cheap LINUX boxes. However, we've also had to do some Windows web development, since certain clients insist on us using ASP, .NET, SQL Server etc. which necesitates using IIS on Windows 2000.
Would anyone be suprised to learn that we are in the farcical situation of haveing to schedule the Win2K server to be rebooted twice a day, because otherwise it dies so badly that major work is needed to restart the damn thing? By comparison some of are *NIX webservers have been up for literally years...
Ummm I think you'll find thats wrong, ok the propotunate loss for IIS is worse, but they've had a notaciable numeric loss too.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
The MS graph looked steady until May of 2002 them something drastic happened. MS took a sharp drop. Apachie at the same time to a jump up. What time did the rash of worms start again?
The truth shall set you free!
How can this be true when many people run Apache on Windows?
Funny thing about this: On many occasions, I've found myself looking at a group trying to install IIS (or the Netscape server or some other commercial server), and getting more and more frustrated over the problems getting it to work.
So, while they're fighting with it, I sit down at an idle machine, point the browser at apache.org, download the latest apache for that platform, and ask them questions while I twiddle the configuration. Within 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how much configging is needed, I fire up the server, and it runs the first try. I invite them to check it out from the other test machines, and they find that it's working. We copy a few web pages to that machine, and they work
The result in almost all cases is that they decide to go with apache "for a while". It's just an interim measure, you understand, until they can get the real web server running. But meanwhile, they have a web server that they can put online. The web developers aren't sitting around idle; they're building the web site.
In the ensuing months or years, I occasionally prod them with "You know, we really should try to get the officially-mandated web server running." The response is usually to put it off until they can get through the huge pile of stuff that they need to put online.
In a few cases, management has gotten upset, and created a team to get the officially-mandated server running. This often succeeds after a few weeks. Then they put that server online, and it's a real disaster. It crashes repeatedly, produces a flood of complaints from baffled customers along the lines of "How the @#&$^%*& do I order things from you now? Your online ordering pages are broken."
After management notices the loss of income from IIS or whatever, they grudgingly agree to go back to apache "until the problems can be worked out."
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I wonder if the upcoming (or is it recently passed by now?) end of support for NT 4.0 is a factor. I would guess that some of the parked domains could be running on NT. With the end of support, these registrars would face either a paid upgrade to W2K/2003 or a free upgrade to Apache on Linux (or whatever) - or I guess they could stay with NT, and live without new security patches...