Apache down, IIS up
Doctor Memory writes "Netcraft's June 2006 web server survey is out, and it shows IIS taking a dramatic upturn, at the expense of Apache. One of the biggest reasons cited is domain registrar Go Daddy switching to IIS for the domains it "parks". The report does go on to note that IIS is also making solid gains in active sites (including some large blog hosts), and further notes that it appears that large hosting companies are dropping Linux." Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache's market share is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment.
The metrics from Netcraft are hard to read with respect to OS. They don't publish a free OS graph that I've found, and you can't assume that any particular percentage of Apache hosts are running on any particular OS.
All this tells you is that the majority of "sites" (that being a nebulous term) are using Apache on some OS as at least their front-line Web servers. They might still be back-ending to whatever, and that would not show up.
Personally, I don't think you can use Netcraft for any purpose other than to say "IIS and Apache are the most popular Web servers."
More importantly is why does it matter anyway? X uses what they like, Y uses what they like. Story over.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Microsoft's share was closer to Apache's in March of 2002 than it is now. There's no reason to believe it won't plateau or drop off again. There's not even a trend yet (like there was back then) that can lend itself to predictions.
^X^S ^X^C
Where I've worked in the past, it seems that the Web Server of choice follows the Application Server of choice. .Net solution, just because of what seemed "a good deal" at the time. .Net integration part and processing data.
If management find a great application that cheaper to run, and maybe has a great support contract at a low price, they buy into the idea, and don't really bother about the fact that they have to move the front end web server technology from say IIS to Apache.
I've been in a situation when a brilliant Apache / Java / Broadvision combination, was replaced by an IIS /
However in my particular situation, us "Sys Admins" loved apache so much, we decided to leave it in at the front end, to serve media, protect the front end and internal-proxy the IIS data, and then have IIS as the middle layer just doing the
So at the end of the day, Netcraft reports apache, but the real grunt of the work is being done by IIS.
Mike
Windows/IIS will never compete in the $20/month free PHP package market, so it's not really worth bothering about.
.NET / C# / SQL Server. With low cost IIS hosting, versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server that are either free or low cost, the features of ASP.NET 2 and DotNetNuke, I probably won't be returning to LAMP any time soon.
That might have been true a few years ago but not now. Have a look at the Windows (and Linux) offerings, including SQL Server, at JodoHost. I'm not connected with them other than as a happy customer. There are plenty of bad Windows hosting companies out there but there are also good ones with prices pretty much the same as LAMP.
I've done a few spare time projects for non-profits. Previously my only realistic choice for these was PHP / MySQL mostly because of hosting and tool costs but my latest project uses
At the last place I worked at IBM did the same thing. They wanted us off LAMP and offered to give us 1-year Websphere and DB2 licenses (something like $10,000 per year afterwards!) and they would even re-write all of our web applications at no charge.
So as I'm in the meeting with these guys all I hear them talk about is their technology. Java this and Java that, scalability, DB2, XML addons, etc. It was all very impressive until I asked them a question for which they had no answer.
What business problem does our current technology fail to solve that your new technology can?
The fact is they had no idea. They didn't care at all about our business, only their technology. Our LAMP system already did what we wanted and I communicated to IBM that our business success had nothing to do with technology, but everything to do with the business model behind it. I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft isn't solving any business problems by converting anyone to IIS.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.