Slashdot Mirror
2003: Year of Apache
John Chamberlain writes "Netcraft's numbers for the new year are in. The trend graphs tell a story: 2003 was the Year of Apache. If Time magazine had a server-of-the-year award the cover would be featuring a feather. Since October 2002 market share has grown from 53% to 64%, a 20% gain while Microsoft IIS, its nearest competitor has shrunk from 36% to 24%, a 33% decline. The change in server totals was even more dramatic. Apache HTTP Server increased from about 20 million to 32 million (+60%) while all other competitors remained flat."
The big advantage of measuring the fall in IIS vs Apache is that web servers are public, and easily counted.
I'm sure that the same thing is happening thoughout the open source movement, but its just alot harder to measure the number of (for example) Linux installs when there is no central body that really collects data on this (not that there is any need for this).
So its representing a victory for much more than Apache.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
MS's recent campagin of Total Cost Of Ownership does not factor well into this. They cite recent studies which heavily stress human maintenance and development costs into the TCO. Yet what they don't cite is the fact that as software popularity grows, such as Apache here, TCO is driven down because the technology is more accesible.
Basic technology such as web servers are on their way of being removed from the realm of competition. 2004 is promising.
The Custom Mary
Web server market share is a funny thing. Do you count the total number of webservers, or just domains? What if you use a very ineffecient implimentation, and it takes twice the number of machines to do it? Should the server get a better market share because of it? The numbers are open to a lot of intepritation.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
If you assumed Apache was *nix only you haven't checked out Apache 2.x on Windows. Perhaps this is the cause of the gain -- Windows users switching to Apache?
Actually, the post says the number of servers for IIS stayed flat. Their percentage decreased, but that seems to be a function of a huge number of ADDITIONAL web servers, of which an enormous percentage are Apache rather than IIS.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Note that the numbers are "per domain" So 2003 is better proclaimed the Year of NameVirtualHost. Hopefully, this means that there really are more httpd's out there, but the correlation was not made in that necraft study. Hopefully someone will do (perhaps already has done?) a study to establish IP# to domain name ratios. My guess is that there is a lot more virtual hosting being done now then there was in, say 1999, when having a corporate web site was more directly related to purchasing dedicated web server equipment. I'll bet that the Microsoft push into public key infrastructure will be used to leverage growth for IIS but at these rates, it may well be hard to catch up with Apache.
:)
But perhaps the real story for 2003, as far as growth technologies go, is likely PHP. The ratio of deployments and actual usage to press coverage of the technology is pretty impressive too.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Shouldn't these issues remain fairly constant? Maybe it's tricky to count market share in absolute terms, but the trend-line should be pretty accurate.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
You make a very good point. Many people can list off Larry Wall, ESR, RMS, and Linus off the top of their head, but don't know the first thing about the principles in the Apache project. Seems to be a nice counter-point to ESR's ego currency as a motivation for OSS. Apache is in my mind the most successful OSS project.
Kudos.
The more you know, the less you understand.
"because it works"
I've run apache on all kinds of systems, from the older pentiums you mention to big-iron Solaris systems.
The beauty is that it works on all of them. You tune some parameters slightly different, but you don't have to learn a new software because you're now hosting your site on a big machine.
Sorry, I applaud all the tiny-http-server efforts, but in real-life the only thing that I ever seriously considered was the kernel-httpd. That was for the image-server of a major dot-com site that made a several hundred hits a second at peak times.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Alright - let's have it! Where are they hiding all the exploits? They obviously have waaaayyyyy more since viruses and exploits are dependant on popularity, not how well the software is engineered. Since Apache is kicking IIS's scraggly ass all over the 'net, it must have more exploits, right? No? Oh? So all those people that keep saying Windows suffers so much are admitting they're wrong?
Oh, that's right. IIS is also an FTP server, mail server, dinner server, and a cheauffer that takes your wife out on dates then screws her in your bed while you're out of town on business.....
... whoops.. sorry, go a little carried away there. Seriously - face it, that's a flaw. If the software wants to do everything, and, by doing everything, fails, it still failed, AND it failed BECAUSE it does everything. That means the Apache software is a better engineered web server and IIS is, well, a load of crap.
Sorry... a little bitter. If you've ever had to administer that horrendous piece of garbage IIS you'd understand. I think, perhaps, the reason Apache is whooping up on IIS is that IIS is so ludicrously twitchy and convoluted. Normally, I'd say point and clicky interfaces are easier to manage, but god... setting something up in IIS that's not set up by default can result in tremendously time-wasting efforts searching through numerous, poorly labeled, badly designed interfaces. Apache? Whip out a reference book, type in a few lines, and you're done. Even if you have to restart the system, it's not much hassle. I've NEVER managed to shut down IIS and bring it back up on Win2k where it didn't stop responding and, eventually, chew up all the resources on the box forcing a hard reboot of the whole system. That pisses off SQL Server which then fucks up the TrendMicro stuff... Ick.
Long story short? IIS sucks and few (smart) people debate that whether they're pro-Microsoft, pro-*nix, pro-Mac, or, smarter than any of them pro-whatever-works.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I find it rather humorous that the poster of the article on Slashdot didn't dare mention the other software that was proven a winner by the Netcraft report. For those of you who haven't RTFA, 4th paragraph begins:
;)
"Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD." That's right, folks. NOT Linux. Don't get me wrong: I don't believe Linux sucks. But there's something to be said here by this data, and I don't feel Linux should get all the current press simply because Linux got all the past press. FreeBSD does amazing things, is used all over the place, has many technical merits not seen elsewhere, but Linux overshadows it because of inertia and the fact that Linux users yell louder. This is sad. Last I knew, Windows won out due to inertia as well, not technical reasons, and we condemn it for that. Must we be hypocritical a second time around?
I know this is Slashdot, but c'mon... would it kill you to put a positive article about FreeBSD on the front-page?
Netcraft confirms it: FreeBSD is quite alive and kicking.
These surveys also do not count the millions of intranet-only sites that these servers serve
Are you sure you don't mean 'sites where administrator is too incompetent to turn off the default install of IIS'?
You know, all those sites that have plagued the internet with various worms and other security holes over the last few years?
and given the nature of the beast, I'm going to guess IIS is rather prevalent in that market
I don't disagree. I rather think IIS dominates at these sites.
Historical: Even though most people use Windows, those that actually know about computing using UNIX (for us, this used to be HP-UX, now it mostly is Linux). It are the latter ones who more than likely started the intranet effort long before management knew what a network was (over here, I myself was involved in our first intranet look-alike long before the word reached the trade-press).
Technical/Economical: If you use Apache for your external site (as we do), than it bloody well makes sense to use it internally as well, instead of wasting time and money maintaining two knowledge skills.
Linux user since early January 1992.
They do not include the zillion corporate intranet servers...
Of all the intranets we install and service for small to large businesses, 100% of them run Apache. That's about 3-4 servers per month, and growing. We know 4 of the 5 competitors in our market, very well. For the vendors we know, all install Apache, exclusively.
Yes. Thanks to the "blaster outbreaks and the growing number of vpns", Apache is also rapidly growing inside the LAN market space.