Apache Webserver Surpasses 50 Million Website Mark

chris81 writes "For the first time ever, the Apache Web Server is powering more than 50 million websites, according to Netcraft's Web Server Survey for October. Although relative share fell by 0.67 percent, the total number of sites powered by Apache grew to over 52 million. Microsoft's IIS finished second with more than 15 million sites served."

Comments

Actually...

[DavidHOzAu]

It's because of php's increasing popularity, as this page shows.

Re:...and

[KiloByte]

I wonder how they count it when you have different names for a single site:

<VirtualHost *>
                ServerName urukpr0n.angband.pl
                ServerAlias urukporn.angband.pl urukp0rn.angband.pl urukpron.angband.pl
[...]
(No, this site isn't what you think.)

This is especially important if you count the fact that in a lot of cases www.$SITE is a CNAME for $SITE.

Odd lines in chart

[inkswamp]

The chart marked "Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - October 2005" is interesting. I'm not entirely sure I understand what it means, but July 2001 and June 2004 show an almost mirror image in terms of the blue and red lines (Apache and MS.) When one goes up, the other goes down and vice-versa. Strange. I wonder what exactly was happening during that time period to cause that.

Re:Odd lines in chart

[guruevi]

Well. That is because of the contracts running with Microsoft. We have a contract (as hostingprovider) that x-% of the servers has to be Windows based so we recompiled Apache to show up as IIS and the next month Netcraft confirmed it, we moved 15000 sites (URL-forwarding) to IIS.

Re:Odd lines in chart

[RoLi]

I'm not sure how IIS survives in the market place

They survive because of customer lock-in (aka "Integration" in salesspeak), "standardization" (with desktop systems) and the delusion (which is interestingly put forward by both pro- and anti Microsoft people) that "sooner or later" Microsoft will dominate every market and so it's better to bet on the winner.

However, with years of IIS being pretty stagnant or slowly losing marketshare, this delusion cannot be sustained forever, more and more people realize that OSS is not just a fad and is here to stay.

Also with each round of forced upgrades on the IIS-side, some jump ship.

It will probably will take a decade or two, but then IIS-fans will find themselves in the very situation they wanted to avoid: Being a tiny minority, fighting with bad 3rd party support and being frowned upon.

In some countries it already happened: In Germany, IIS runs only 5.56% of domains (down from over 20% 5 years ago) - cheap German webhosters don't offer Windows anymore at all, some webhosters charge extra for Windows and only few charge the same (however those are usually the most expensive webhosters anyway)

Three considerations

[VincenzoRomano]

#1. Sites vs servers.
Netcraft states they count the sites while they don't mention whether they count 2nd level domains (foo.com), 3rd level domains (www.foo.com, support.foo.com) or what else. They just say they "received responses from 74,409,971 sites" while not defining what a site actually is.

#2. Growth.
There has been a growth of about 3.73% in the number of (so called) web sites. There must be some hidden winner(s). That is, there must be some group of web servers that is getting the great part of the growth all at once! Netcraft is failing to mention who they are!

#3. Webserver (or website) identification.
It's all but trivial to identify web servers. Are they using some special tool like amap and nmap or just looking at the server response content? How accurate this identification can be?

what operating systems are popular with Apache?

[SgtChaireBourne]

I would be interested to see what OSes those sites are running on

Netcraft used to show a summary with that information. I'm not sure why they stopped showing it, since they do still collect it and show it for individual site queries. I suppose if enough people ask them to reinstate it, they might actually reply to one of the messages and explain the rationale. More likely than not it probably made it evident that one of their major advertisers **cough**MS**cough was losing market share to both other http servers and other platforms.

Along the same lines, I saw a recent IDC report that showed (if one looked at the data oneself) that MS was continuing to lose market share in the server room, at least percentage wise. My guess is that they took most of Novell's share around 2000 when they ran the smear campaign against Netware and then have been slowly hemorrhaging marketshare since then.