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.
But it also happens to be about 20% more than 53... I think that's what they mean.
Happy New Year, it's 1984!
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
Well, 33% of "36" is 12.. 36-12=24.
I wonder though, when Netcraft (and subsequently Slashdot) reported about a rise in ISS-usage, many commented about "But they're just being used as domain parking servers". When the same thing happened but with Apache, most people just say "Yay Apache!"
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Our department is moving from IIS 4.0 to Apache 1.3.29 within the next few months. The server is up & running and I'm working on porting our site over. The reasoning for the switch?
:)
While MS requires patching & monitoring, so does Apache/Linux (although it's not as time-consuming IMO). I also haven't had up-time issues with IIS although I inherently believe Apache would beat IIS in that category.
The true reason is that Apache processes SSI from the outside, while IIS processes them from the inside. I can make more modular code using apache (i.e. a single template for the whole site that the index files link to, and that template links to "content" and "data" files in a given directory). It also seems to perform better, but that's because I was using Access on the IIS machine, and MySQL on the Apache machine. Also Apache/MySQL are cheaper (putting SCO aside).
The only other good reason was to learn something new/different to make myself more marketable.
A 33% decline is a decline by a third. A decline from 36% to 24% is also a decline by a third. Ok, there was rounding involved. What's your problem?
People don't generally switch web servers just for the heck of it. Obviously, there must be something seriously wrong with IIS to make people switch - I wonder what that could be...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I love apache, but the one thing that bothers me is the two versions (1.3.x and 2.x). I originally started using the 2.x and found that a lot of people weren't using it. Then later to my dismay I found that wanting to adapt PHP would be troublesome so I had to switch to 1.3.x. It's okay either way because it was painless. And no trouble. So take that people who pay for bloated products that work just as well or less than the ever loved free Apache. All hail Apache.
Is anyone surprised? It's a superior piece of software from the competition. And the users (meaning IT folks and people who run web sites) are not your average Joe Blow, so having open source software makes absoulute sense. It's not like a desktop app (like a word processor) where the person using it would have a need or want or ability to go mess with the code for some reason.
Additionally, any serious security bugs have been fixed with blazing speed. Compare that with the amount of time MS takes to patch a IIS hole when an exploit is found.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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
We need to a series -- a long series -- of Slashdot interviews with key Apache people. I mean, look at all the stuff they're into. And the list doesn't seem to have any vaporware or bogged-down projects -- which is damned remarkable in the Open Source community, where people tend to be big on ideas and short on followthrough. Let's get these people under the microscope and find out what they're doing right!
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?
It would be nice to see how this would look for percentage of http traffic rather than percentage of domains. I'm not sure who would be favored, but it seems like a better metric.
...so many even tiny sites - home PCs, private tiny hosts and such, run Apache.
It's big. It's slow. (okay, it can stand a big load without much slowdown, but overall latency is high) It's a system hog. These computers are often older Pentiums, sometimes 486s, sometimes used as clients/terminals, sometimes serving several other tasks.
Why people so rarely use tiny HTTP servers like Boa, Mathopd, thttpd... especially, that those tiny thingies are extremely fast under light load, light on system resources, have most of features every "amateur webmaster" wants, and because of small code base, usually completely bug-free.
Field for "Evangelism"?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
(punting SCO ass-side).
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Did anyone notice that in July 2002, Apache took a hit in numbers, and Microsoft gained for a brief period of time? (Check the graph, you will notice a spike in Microsoft's numbers, a dip in Apache in July 2002.) Does anyone know what this corresponds to?
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!
Netcraft gives very specific rules by which it measures webserver counts here: http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/mechanics.html
:)
Always helps to actually visit the site. Their methods will favor Apache somewhat, as IIS does not generally play very well in hosting environments with virtual domains for various reasons. Of course that in itself is an indicator of server quality
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!
These are crooked figures. Don't take them seriously! The real marketshare of IIS is above 80 percent. The catch is, IIS boxes are declaring themselves as Apache servers to avoid attacks. Note: This not an MS sponsored report (yet). Hopefully they will contact me and it will become one. :)
These statistics make us happy, but they're not the whole story.
When we bragg about these numbers, Microsoft respond with:
"Our webserver is used by more Forbes/Fortune 500 companies and is used by more secure websites. Apaches numbers are only high because a lot of amateurs use it".
What is our argument to that? (we don't have one. We just ignore it and continue patting ourselves on the back.)
If we are to progress, it's better to look at what going *wrong*, and try to improve that.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
It's even funnier, since Netcraft only counts public webservers. They do not include the zillion corporate intranet servers that used to be publicly available shielde by only NTLM authentication.
Thanks to the blaster outbreaks and the growing number of vpns these servers are now shielded off the regular internet. And thus the number of IIS in Netcraft's reports declines..
Even then, how do you count them? How many machines are running any given web site? My sites currently have 8 servers behind a pair of load balancers. But it appears to the outside world as if it's a single machine. Also, do you consider all servers equal? Should my personal site be given equal weight with my company's banking sites? I'd be interested to see a weighted graph so that sites with more traffic have a greater impact. But the problem with that is, how do you measure it?
As an aside, I'm getting mildly concerned about Apache's market share. Not because I don't like it -- I do, and run both personal and corporate sites with it. But I distrust software monocultures, and I fear Apache's heading that way. So I hope that Apache gets some viable competition. I also hope, however, that it comes from somewhere that isn't intent on displacing it with proprietary, incompatible servers. So that'd be something other than IIS, then...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
We run an online testing and certification engine, written in perl. It WAS hosted on a Win2K/IIS box, but about once a week the server would lock up with IIS hitting 100% CPU utilisation and the only way to 'fix' it was to reboot. The same code's been running on a Redhat 9/Apache server for about 2 months now with no downtime.
Our MD was so impressed with the port (which was very trivial), that she's asked me to consider migrating our main in-house server to Linux too - it's mainly a 'file and print' box so this should be a piece of cake.
We WERE looking at a contact management system (possibly Maximizer or Goldmine), but now we're seriously considering an open source alteratives-should save us about 7000UKP in apps and licences.
AT&ROFLMAO
OK, I see it's a troll, but... I'll bite anyway. The whole history of Western Civilization in a nutshell looks like that. Once there were the pre-hellenic mediterranean cultures, like the Phoenicians. The Greeks conquered and destroyed them all. Then came the Romans, who conquered and destroyed the Greeks (not to mention the Celts). Then came the German and Slavonic barbarians, and they conquered and destroyed the Romans (and then repeatedly conquered and destroyed each other, like the Goth who perished for the Vandals etc). So if you live, say, in London, there are ashes of dozens of destroyed cultures under your feet, under the pavement of the very Oxford Street. The Celts, the Celtic-Romans, the Roman-Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Danes, the Normans etc.
Now, for a long time Americans were fed with the not-exactly-true fairy tale about the Mayflower settlers, who arrived to a no-man's-land. It was not a no-man's-land at all. It had its native inhabitants and they were, indeed, conquered. But the British Islands were not a no-man's-land neither, when the William the Conqueor arrived, and he is still regarded as hero.
There's nothing racist in Apache, just as there's nothing racist when modern Britons use greek, latin, saxon or celtic words. Or when modern Italians use the name La Fenice (="country of Phoenicians") for an opera.
Sorry for feeding trolls.
How many people have plans of leaving apache 1.3x to newer apache 2x ?
Enough said
Sunny Dubey
No, that's an indicator of server quality for that purpose. If the majority of server operators didn't want virtual hosting, for example, IIS not playing well in that environment won't make a shred of a difference.
These surveys also do not count the millions of intranet-only sites that these servers serve, and given the nature of the beast, I'm going to guess IIS is rather prevalent in that market.
I have recommended IIS-based solutions before, and given the same requirements, I'll do it again.
Actually, the name comes from "A Patchy Server" because it was built as thousands of patches instead of one reliably growing code tree.
If Time magazine had a server-of-the-year award the cover would be featuring a feather.
If Time magazine had a server-of-the-year award nobody would read it. Except you people.
I just don't see this as that significant because of that.
My 2 cents.
Too much stuff does not work well under Apache 2.0.x. Specifically mod_perl has some interesting gotcha's, HTML::Mason has some issues, there are some Apache::DBI issues, .... long list.
Basically when the server went to 2.0.x, the rest of the supporting community wasn't ready. Most of it is still in testing mode. The 1.3.x branch is "good enough", and it doesn't break stuff. 2.0 is good, but it breaks stuff.
Another way to look at it is that my company ships product based upon 1.3.x. Moving to 2.0.x would require several things which don't yet exist. As we are happily operating under 1.3.x, we have no reason to move. If the Apache folks decide to completely abandon 1.3.x, thats OK as we have source and can fix it as needed.
I suspect that most folks will stay with 1.3.x for the forseeable future. The 2.0.x migration will cause more headache than it is worth, and it will cost money/time.
A decline in usage of X from 36% to 24% means the incidence of X in the population has declined 12%.
"Since October 2002 market share has grown from 53% to 64%, a 20% gain". Well no. The incidence in the population has increased 11 percentage points (11%), even though the numbers are ~20% different the market share certainly hasn't changed 20%.
Here is an example of basic comprehension of percentage: Assume we have a static population of 100. 53 use Apache and 47 use 'other'. One year later, if 64 use Apache (the population is still 100), the amount of Apache users has increased ~20%, but the amount of the population has increased using Apache is only 11 more, 11% more of the population use Apache. It is therefore correct to say "there are ~20% more Apache users" and it is incorrect to say "market share has grown ~20%" as it has grown 11%.
Yours was a nice lighthearted comment, pity it needs such a detailed explanation for all of the down mods and incorrect replies you've got.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
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.
I think it's the other way around -- people choose Apache so they don't have to run Windows. It's probably not a coincidence that 2003 was also the year of the Windows Security Patch.
I another /. story a month or so ago showed in corporate America IIS is still their choice. Those are the minds that need to be opened up.
I would say corporate America sticks with IIS and other MS products because of MS development products are easy enough for Fred the Beancounter to drag-n-drop an app together. A desk jockey can get something done for his department quick and easy. Good code no, but it gets the job done and it was cheap and that is what the PHB care about.
LAMP tools need to become that easy to use for corporate America to take a look.
For the overly slashdot-addled, the same headline (and similar story) is being run as we speak on K5.
Kind of reminiscent of the time when Time and Newsweek ran identical cover stories on Bruce Springsteen.
Y'all are forgetting that a good layer 7 proxying firewall is also going to skew things.
With the combination of URLScan header removal and a Unix-based firewall (few folks are insane enough to put up IIS webservers and Windows Firewalls on the same network...) my IIS5/6 hosts don't look anything like a Windows box as far as Netcraft is concerned.
Throw in a hardware load balancer doing SSL offloading, and the client connections are never going to see my hosts directly for Netcraft to count.
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.
We say "Google runs {A highly customised version of} Apache. So there!". html
http://www.googleblog.ca/archives/000018
That's the fun with statistics. You can slice them anyway you want to get the results you want.
So, there is a segment of the market that uses IIS more than Apache. Should we argue with that? Why?
Now, despite all those "amateurs" that are putting Apache on the Internet, Apache still has fewer worms, exploits, etc than IIS.
Which tells you that all those "amateurs" are:
#1. Better qualified than those non-amateurs running IIS.
#2. Running a better product.
or
#3. Just plain lucky, over and over and over again.
Microsoft's TCO campaign is a last ditch effort to maintain market share. It's mostly a lie, but it's damaging to them even if true.
Assume they are telling the truth. I know that it's hard to keep a straight face reading that, but think of what it means. WHERE TECHNICAL MERIT IS THE DECIDING FACTOR, FREE SOFTWARE IS OVERWHELMINGLY PREFERED DESPITE HIGHER COST. Most companies ask themselves what a failed web site will cost them. The answer generally dwarfs the cost of the sofware and it's upkeep.
Of course, we all know that it costs nothing to aquire free web servers and less to keep them up than their non free counterparts. That's just the way good software works.
The same thing is true on the desktop. Most small businesses with a brain have a reseller to help them out with technical issues. Free software, when adopted there, will prove both cheaper and more reliable. Small businesses that dabble with HPs and their own M$ based IT are wasting time that would better be spent on their real business. The reseller may appear more expensive up front than trundeling down to CompUSA, but he's not. Resellers that move to free software are going to enjoy cost, feature and performance advantages that the 2003 server fanboys can only dream of. The same can be said of larger IT shops that can afford to do IT themselves, like ummm IBM
Microsoft's FUD campaign is running out of steam. They have tried all of this before and people are no longer listening.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The figures you've quoted from my site are accurate, but the situation for Microsoft is actually worse than that. When considering that Microsoft got 19% of new websites in 2003, it's worthwhile to consider that up to the end of 2002, Microsoft had a total of 24.74% of active sites.
This means that not only is Microsoft's share only 19%, Microsoft's market share is going down and Apache's is going up. Although Apache can run on MS Windows, it is nearly always run on Unix systems. The most popular Unix is Linux, which is busily replacing the proprietary Unices. So if Apache's share is going up (which it is) Linux's share is going up even faster:
I don't have figures as to whether this is also the case for other types of server, but I strongly suspect it is.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.
I have recommended IIS-based solutions before, and given the same requirements, I'll do it again. :)
Dear lord, you must be stopped.
When you measure active sites only, Microsoft's market share is 19% and falling.
Maybe it's tricky to count market share
It's tricky, alright. It's obvious to anyone that Microsoft's IIS is the clear leader.
Look, if those figures were real, then Apache would be constantly attacked by hoards of script kiddies. [ducks under desk]
What is our argument to that? (we don't have one. We just ignore it and continue patting ourselves on the back.)
Actually, we have: If you do not count the number of websites, but the number of pages served, Apache comes out even more in front of IIS as by simply counting the number of servers. For example, where I work we are serving more than a billion web pages - per month. We are using Apache on Suse Linux.
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.
I've used this NetMask utility to mask my IIS server before now(I tried the trial, and its run out), and in the past Netcraft has properly identified the server as running Apache on Redhat 9. This ain't true, as it's running Win2K with IIS5. So I'm wondering, how many of the new servers are what they say they are? And just HOW skewed are the Netcraft results?
It's nice to see that Apache is gaining ground. Now it if could only send out WMV and RAR files with the correct MIME type, that would be great!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Now, despite all those "amateurs" that are putting Apache on the Internet, Apache still has fewer worms, exploits, etc than IIS.
Which tells you that all those "amateurs" are:
#1. Better qualified than those non-amateurs running IIS.
#2. Running a better product.
or
#3. Just plain lucky, over and over and over again.
You're making an excluded-middle argument. If I were Microsoft, this is what I would argue:
"The reason why IIS is targeted more than Apache is becuase the evil terrorist hackers out there hate Microsoft and specifically target Microsoft over the communist Apache."
When the hacker community responds, "That's not true. We target your crap because it's easy." then I (Microsoft) would dismiss it as, "You can't trust what they say. They're evil terrorist hackers."
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Now your host access and error logs for (example.ods.org) have all the real accesses, and the default logs have all the CodeRed, Nimda, Spam Proxy attempts, ISP TOS Checker, and 5cr1p7 k1dd13z.
Don't worry, IIS gets stopped either by memory leaks, MS Patches, or worms at least once a month. What I found amazing was that so many decided to let MS IIS touch the public Internet. I've learned my lesson, nothing made by MS touches the public Internet and must be protected by a circle of Linux boxes.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
-Thomas Jefferson 1816
The jakarta project (including ant which is now a top level apache project) has spawned a number of projects that are almost de facto in their area like struts, tomcat, cactus and many more.
Struts is an MVC framework that even includes tools to generate javascript validation code. This is a very common method to create a model 2 architecture J2EE site. Tomcat is the standard in open source servlet containers and often refered to as the reference implementation on a JSP and Servlet spec. Cactus is for unit testing J2EE components and is starting to become more popular.
If you intend to program java, then you should visit the Jakarta site.
As for who these people are, there are usually some pages on a project to mention that sort of thing. I'm most familiar with struts and their page for that sort of information is the volunteers page. Ant is already the defacto java build tool. Originally designed as a replacement for make, it's abilities can be extended using java classes.
Jakarta and Apache projects will continue to be a source of innovation, especially within the java world.
Paul Sundling
If raw counts of usages indicate quality, then MSIE would be the highest quality web browser by a factor of around 20 (something 95% market share right?). Outlook would be the best mail/PIM software. /. readers would disagree with such a statement. So why do we accept conclusions based the same type of logic based on stats from netcraft?
What "we" need is something like some the stock market indicators. [the good ones] are not just a raw sum of all the stocks out there, or all the stocks traded on a given market. There a collection of hand picked stocks. I suspect the specific criteria for being included are secret, but long term stability is almost definitly an important peice of the pie. There not using penny stocks, just IPOd companies, companies in trouble, or companies experiencing isolated/unique growth.
What I propose for someone to do, is to develop such a system for HTTP server usage. Build a list of say, 5000, sites. The sites should be distributed accross all topics, all markets. It should include sites run by non-IT centric companies, IT companies that are primarly "brick and mortar" and web-only companies as well. It should include scanning web hosting companies, colo housed sites, sites run off 56k modems. What they have in common is that they all have some level of longevity (if not stability).
That's one of the nice things about Apache. Running Apache doesn't mean running the same Apache that someone else does. mod_perl, Jakarta, mod_php, mod_whatever are all competing with each other. Apache is essentially a platform, not just a server.
I forget what 8 was for.
TCO does NOT include migration costs (initial training and porting apps). (These are important factors and need to be addressed in the Return On Investment (ROI) calculations.)
TCO is NOT applicable between companies UNLESS they are practically identical (same number of techs with the same training managing the same number of servers with the same OS's running the same apps (not similar apps, the same apps) for the same number of users, connected in the same fashion (wireless, wired, VPN'd in, etc) using the same desktop OS, etc).
Usually, TCO will come down to human maintenance (and floor space, cooling, etc) and licensing costs.
Neither Migration Costs nor TCO take into account money lost when the server is DOWN!
Microsoft usually does the following:
#1. Incorrectly includes training for other products as TCO instead of Migration.
#2. With #1., they do NOT include training on Microsoft products (assumes people already know it).
#3. Ends the "period" prior to the NEXT round of license expenses.
The Migration Costs (plus) the annual TCO (minus) downtime savings = $$$ You have to get from ROI.
TCO is MEANINGLESS when used by itself.
-and-
TCO is usually calculated incorrectly anyway.
The REAL issue with Open Source is the MIGRATION COST because so many people have apps that they depend upon that must be ported.
Which is why Microsoft does tries to confuse the issue with bogus TCO claims.
If you focus on the MIGRATION COSTS, you can handle them in smaller chunks over a longer period of time. Bit by bit, move your systems over to Open Source based servers and services.
If Microsoft are trying to sell it on the basis of "big professional companies use IIS", it doesn't really work for me. I'm interested in what sites like Amazon, Google, the BBC, Tesco, Natwest, BT, British Airways and the IMDB run on. Stuff that either gets a lot of traffic, has to be secure or both.
I don't have a list of the Forbes 500, but I've had a look at the FTSE 100 in the UK, and a great deal of those companies don't have what I'd call major websites - their businesses don't depend on high traffic. There are companies involved in Biotech, Construction, Mining and Food production.
It puts a bit of a dampener on the "celebration" of Apache's otherwise successful year w.r.t. market share.
"Our webserver is used by more Forbes/Fortune 500 companies and is used by more secure websites. Apaches numbers are only high because a lot of amateurs use it"
Yes, IIS is used by many Fortune 500 companies, but so is Apache. My largest client "uses" IIS for a small vendor supplied internal application (so MS$ counts it as an IIS site). But 99% of internal and external web pages are served from Apache.
Speaking as a member of the Apache HTTP Server project, I am curious - why aren't you moving to Apache 2.0?
Unfrtunately, Apache still defaults to text/plain for content whose type it does not know... IIS is much more sane and defaults to application/octet-stream. Apache's behavior (given IE ignoring MIME types) is the single biggest reason non-IE browsers are starting to ignore MIME types as well.
apache's good, really damn good, and oncey ou get some optimizations in, it's sheer ownage.
it's complicated, but in a good way, and to configure it, you may have to sit there for an hour scrolling along, playing around with the options, but once you get it going, it works, and is stable.
not to mention a lot of the 3rd gui configurators are easier to understand than IIS, and give more options that give you total control of your webserver. the percentage that doesnt use apache are either afraid of it, think it's too hard, dont care, unwilling windows users that have it enabled by default, or companies that have CEO's that are tied by the balls to bill gates' finger.
Yes, it's nice that Apache is open source, and it would be a disaster if the situation were reversed wrt. IIS.
But what I'd really like to see is a lot more diversity in web servers. Apache is a reliable, robust, efficient server, but it is only one, very specific way of serving web data and it has tons of quirks as well (starting with its configuration files).
Having Apache open makes it easier to innovate based on it. But I think it would be even better if more people did something altogether different rather than just plugging into Apache.
If I was to set up a web server, I'd use a Linux+Apache config too. But that's because I ain't got no money, not because I particularly trust Apache.
don't put words in my mouth.
That isn't what I was doing. I was employing a rhetorical device to draw your attention to the fact that a great many such servers also exist, and they provide a more of a problem than they do a solution.
There are authentication tools that IIS brings to the table that makes them really attractive in the intranet server market (like being able to obtain domain login information.
You mean domain in the peculiar Microsoft sense of the term, right? I can see how IIS might offer some embrace and extend-style additions to try and tie people in to their OS as well, yeah.
Wow, Apache lets you add functionality through plug-ins that use a standard API? That's amazing! Just about every other web server has that too, but they don't make you run a bunch of command line config crap and recompile like Apache does, so it's not as k3wl. Recompiling is fun and definitely better than using some stupid installer that gets the configuration right the first time.
What other features can we gush about? Oh my god, it serves HTTP too? That's awesome! Can it talk to the filesystem and actually keep a log of the HTTP accesses, though? That would be really amazing.