Slashdot Mirror
Netcraft Says IIS Gaining on Apache
benjymouse quotes this month's netcraft survey "In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position."
People (I.T. guys included) will almost always go with what they are comfortable with. IIS is very easy to configure and you could have a Windows Server up and running in no time. With Apache, it's not so simple. Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple. And some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.
I personally use Apache on my servers. But I could also take my good old time configuring them because I'm not planning on making any money from them.
The game.
IIS comes with Windows servers and has an easy configuration GUI?
That is an interesting point. How many of them are "parked" domains and how many are active sites? ANY web server can handle 5000 inactive URLs pointing to flunky advertising sites. I would like to see those states with the domain registrars excluded.
Namely a little bit of boredom in the web world plus the difficulty of trying to find new and interesting sites now that folks have figured out how to manipulate Google rankings.
Plus the fact that you can now run many more LAMP web sites per server than was previously possible. I mean, figure it out -- how many virtual sites can a person run on a modern fully configured Apache server than they could in say, 1999 before the dot com bubble burst. CPUs cores are something like 4-5x more powerful if not more, hard disk arrays bigger and faster, and the configuration setups probably ten times better. So it takes less Apache servers to run more sites, yes?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Based on my experience with MS products, GUIs make really shitty configuration interfaces. You have to click all over the place to set things up, and there is no way to look at very many of the options at a time when they are spread across multiple tabs. Fine when you are following a "run sheet", but a total nightmare when you are trying to troubleshoot something.
Have you ever actually used the IIS or Exchange (or even Outlook) configuration GUI? <shudder>
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Since it's not installed out of the box on XP, Win2k3 or Vista, its then someone installing it because they want to.
Someone installing IIS on their home computer is more than likely aware of Apache and didn't install it for whatever reason.
Maybe the decline in Apache is due to the leaps IIS has taken in both reliablity (4 of the top 10 hosts with the best reliablity are running W2k3), supportability, expandiblity and security. Not to mention OOTB it can do a lot more than Apache does OOTB.
And I was wondering... what the hell happened in March - April '06 that started the trend of Apache decreasing and IIS servers increasing?
.NET? SQL Server? Vista? Something changed in that time frame.
--
Many legitimate hosting sites use a handful of IPs for hundreds or thousands of sites. Counting by IP isn't valid.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Having used both extensively over the past 10 years, IMHO 90% of the config tasks are easier with IIS for a non-expert, but
5% are MUCH harder, and the remaining 5% you just can't do at all. Period. It's that 5% that makes IIS a non-option for me personally. For some of the sites we host, either server would work fine, but in those cases, there is no reason to pay a license fee for IIS.
One of the other benefits of having worked with both apache and IIS is that that 90% of what is normally easier in IIS really isn't if you develop internal tools to do that work for apache. In fact, a single web page with just a few fields on it runs a script that sets up DNS, apache, firewall, database, chroot jail, and optionally even an entire virtual machine, fully configured and running.
It's just "by default" those scripts are not included with Apache like they are with IIS.
Also, once you learn the Apache syntax and understand how things work, it turns out that using an editor isn't any harder than the IIS GUI. In fact, it's usually MUCH easier/faster for anything repetitive.
Not surprising because we are moving away from "hobbies" to "packages."
By hobbies I mean how many new dot coms are being created? How many people are creating new and nifty content? Some sure, but the vast majority of folks are companies that see the web as a necessity and not a money maker.
The innovative companies need flexibility, power and tunability, which is given by Apache, and the LAMP stack. The corporations that see the web as a necessity just want to put information onto the Internet. They don't care about "social networks." They just care that their catalog can be viewed. And that is the domain of Microsoft, not Apache.
I personally see these statistics as a maturation of the web, not that Apache is loosing market share.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I believe that netcraft is counting sites, not servers. As such, consolidating servers would not explain netcraft's numbers.
*sigh* back to work...
A "n00b admin" isn't going to be able to master anything in a weekend. They might figure out how to set something up & get it working but mastery is a long ways off.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
Not a typewriter
also Microsoft professionals created the IT infrastructure that has caused billions of dollars in malware-related downtime, and degraded to useless performance of infested machines. Thank you Bill Gates, you've fucked up more businesses than any world war.
Does it matter anymore? The point was made years ago. Apache's triumph on the web was touted during a time when we were trying to make a point that open source software was legitimate for large scale use in the real world. Everyone knows that now. In fact, open source has conclusively, and probably forever, denied Microsoft a monopoly in the server market. If they are making gains now (and yes, their biggest gains are most certainly in parking sites, to whom they probably pay megabucks for no other purpose than to skew the Netcraft survey) it isn't really relevant.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Assuming the ark ever actually existed, and that the fairy tale is true, then the builders of the ark were given instructions from their god. And if you accept that their god was/is all-knowing, then they can't really be called amateurs.
:)
Alternately, the builders of the Titanic were not the ones that sailed full-steam into an area full of icebergs, after ignoring warnings of said icebergs in said area.
Besides - I thought we were supposed to make car analogies, not boat analogies.
Have you ever used .NET? That's why.
.NET, all of our developers have become much much more effective. The defect rates of our new C# code compared to our old C++ code are microscopic. We've converted our Apache based SOAP server to ASP.NET's XML WebServices and found that the development is faster, the code is cleaner, and again the defect rate is down. Our web development is currently in PHP, but we've found that if our web developers write C# / ASP.NET, our systems developers can help out with quality control, supplying code samples and advice, and even directly coding for the web. We're in the process of planning the ASP.NET version of our web applications.
.NET is a great platform for the rapid development of low defect applications. If you don't develop on Windows, give Mono a shot. I consider their successful efforts to be amazing.
.NET and we want to stay on the .NET train (advancements in IIS7 are going to be very useful to us) using IIS6 as our webserver is a no-brainer.
Since we've converted our systems and middleware development to C#
The simple fact is, whether you like Microsoft or not,
For our purposes, the fact that we use
Apache certainly works, but the question for us is, why use Apache? What is so compelling about Apache that would make us want to give up IIS6? We've used Apache for years and continue to do so to this day, but it isn't doing anything special for us except hosting PHP scripts (the performance of which, even with an accelerator, could be better).
Let us venture into Twitter's brain to see the thought process behind this post:
"What? Evidence that Linux lost marketshare in something? UNPOSSIBLE! Looks like I'll have to make something up as usual!"
Are you that insecure in the software you use that you have to see any minor percentage point change in something as either the end of Microsoft or anti-Linux FUD?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I'm surprised you aren't modded higher, frankly. This is the primary reasons open source isn't doing well. People stay with what they are comfortable with. MS Office in high school => MS office in college => MS office in the workplace. Windows in high school => Windows in college => Windows in the workplace. Geeks are constantly in denial about these things because they are always working to make things better, faster, and more efficient. But "People", generally speaking, go with what's comfortable, easy, and common. Drop down menus, radio boxes, etc are "common". Command line? Editting Text files? Apache better get out of the whole in a hurry. The server market is no longer a market where you can afford to be different. It's a commodity market, they are a dime a dozen, and if I can click a radio box as opposed to editing a text file - guess which I'm going to do?
No but if one guy has two IP addresses pointing at his IIS server and the other one only one IP pointing at his Apache server, the server count would be IIS : Apache, 2:1 while the physical server count would still be 1 : 1. This can't be even acceptable as a means for counting Apache installations.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Going to karma hell for this but, tell me, is paying someone (if they did) better or worse than Bruce Perens faking host headers in order to boast Apache ratings? Or is that even sillier than your assertion that MS sneaked IIS back on by default? (which of course wouldn't make a big dent anyway as more Windows boxes are behind firewalls than in front, and those ones already exposed on port 80 are probably doing it on purpose).
As the Perens stunt shows netcraft may not just be relying on host headers at all as you seem to think.
Easy to dismiss any and all critique or questioning as "bashing", isn't it. At least part of the question got answered:
... Starting with Server 2003 (four years ago now) IIS is off by default. In Vista, its not even installed.However, what about XP? Of the MS server platforms MS Server 2003 has negligable market penetration compared to XP.
It's common enough for MS patches and upgrades and services packs to turn things on or off, change configurations or just plain break something. So it's happened before, and since most of us have to work and don't have time or interest to follow the details of MS Windows, it's logical to ask.
It's also logical to ask because the remaining MS Windows users have become so used to that kind of effect from patches, upgrades and service packs that they don't complain. In fact it gains them a few hours of overtime. The press doesn't comment either, because it happens again and again and is business as usual, and because the remaining trade magazines are so dependent on MS advertising that the editors won't let any non-praise slip through.
Easy to dismiss any and all critique or questioning as "bashing", isn't it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You are right. I think it's a little easier for someone with no web server admin experience to setup IIS than Apache. However, Apache admins, on the whole, tend to be more knowledgeable of how things work than their IIS counterparts. This tends to be true all around whether it's a *nix operating system, shell scripting, databases, etc. I had one IT manager, when run into Oracle problems, get frustrated and suggest converting the whole database to one single flat file and having the application use that (The reason here is that this database was outside the world of MS. And to MS people, if something is outside that world, it's hopeless). And he was a Microsoft guy.
I love that little barrier to entry found outside of Microsoft. It ensure some minimum level of knowledge. That way I don't have to listen to some ASP programmer tell me how he likes the "IIS operating system" over the "Apache operating system". Let's just hope it stays that way.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
Troll somewhere else. No assertion was made. A question was asked and you do have to admit that even though the answer appears to be "no" that it was/is a possibility.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I kinda must agree there. I've always been an Apache guy. We use it on lots and lots of servers here, and it's never been that bad to setup. Recently though, we bought an app whose web component is ASP.NET based and needs to run on IIS. While it hasn't gotten me to switch off of Apache on my other boxes, I must say that the configuration utilities and flexibility (not degree but ease with which you can exercise it) was certainly a welcome thing. While I'm sure that Apache can probably do more when fine tuned, if IIS can do 80% of what Apache does with 20% of the effort, it's gonna win some converts.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Jeez. Anything other than praise, including questions, is now dismissed as bashing. No wonder MS is regarded as a cult.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
MS is good at this game of incrementally taking market share away from competitors. They have been doing it for years. They will match features, add luxuries, push it hard to business types, give it away, offer automated conversion ... whatever they think it takes.
.NET, Office, etc, all the stuff that millions of developers are already familiar with.
Nobody thought Office could replace WordStar, but MS beavered away at it, adding new features people liked and matching existing features, and now it's a distant memory. Same for Excel. The first versions of windows were jokes, but MS kept working on them and took the desktop over. Nobody used Windows as a server at first, but MS built NT and improved it and now they run the majority of small businesses and many larger ones. They had nothing in the database server market, but they bought SQL Server from Sybase and beavered away at it, and now they run a decent percentage of websites and many businesses. They were late to "the internet" but turned things round, built a browser that was the best for a while (IE5), and a web server that is now a serious contender.
Meanwhile Linux gains at the expense of Unix, and Linux geeks sit complacently back thinking they cannot be assailed. In reality the same forces that MS brough to bear on the desktop apply here: ignorance of alternatives, familiarity, PHBs, marketing, training, and, for the most part, the ability to do a decent job. Add to that the ability to easily integrate existing desktop/small business stuff, like connecting to COM objects, SQL server,
It makes me nervous to think that Microsoft could take the server off Unix/Linux as well. I don't think it's as far off as some might think. They are learning from Linux/Unix, in that their newer stuff is taking things like "xcopy deployment" and XML for ocnfig quite seriously.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Maybe "become familiar enough to do useful things with" would be better.
In aviation parlance, it's "Knowing just enough to be dangerous". While Microsoft can enable trained monkeys to run the IT department, it will produce more lock-in, thus more dependency on what will be very expensive paid support if market share reaches a certain mass, and lower salaries. Win-win for the bean counters everywhere.
What?
LA LA LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING.
.NET is easier and faster then PHP is for a lot of jobs. Installations doesn't require modifying text files.... Sure apache has its plusses and many of them are substantial. But this Excuses and ignoring the facts will only lead to your own disaster. Much like how mainframes died (or at least greatly diminished) over a decade ago. Sure Mainframes are faster and better then PC components but that is not what the people want. Open Source and Apache is doing the same thing, it is putting in stuff that they think they want not the bulk of their users. People want a GUI configuration tool, People want it to be defaultly built in with a full featured server side language. People don't want to compile their installation with a bunch of of cryptic commands for features they do or do not know what it does. People want GUI Application Development software so what they program will go onto the server. Apache and the OSS Community is doing a poor job in offering such services to the people. So in the spirit of freedom that the OSS Community as given them they feel free to use IIS because it gives them what they need. Most people do not have the time or the will to program these changes, most people only like Open Source Applications because it is free IIS comes already with Windows Server so it is fee enough for them. Don't be stupid and make excuses while more and more market-share slips away go an actively improve your product to help keep the market share you have and perhaps influence others to go back to IIS.
Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Wrong! We would still have massive IT infrastructures, it just would have happened slightly later at the hands of some other company. Perhaps Apple or maybe some other completely different company that didn't make it because Microsoft showed up. Just because one event in history does not happen doesn't mean that all subsequent events don't happen, almost always it just means that some other event will occur to fill its place and things will only change slightly.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Some nOOb could think they have mastered IIS in a weekend. Because they could get a web site up and running. That's really part of the problem. People setting up Web Servers not knowing what they are doing.
It's akin to people thinking they are CEO material, just because they can make a power point presentation.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
So, because you had poor engineers and a poorly implemented solution, the technology sucks? How do you rationally reach that conclusion when you admit in your own argument that the solution was poorly engineered? Shouldn't you be blaming the engineers / consultants rather than the technology used? I guarantee there are similar examples of poorly implemented solutions based around apache.
If you're going to be spouting off about how IIS is a bicycle and apache is a locomotive, perhaps you could give us examples of equally implemented solutions that compare performance. Don't cop out that they had "Microsoft consultants" either, since the majority of
I suppose at least you qualified this as your "subjective opinion"...but still
- dm - The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
Of course, when it is, the attacker will be in ring-0.
In contrast: if my web-server is rooted, the attacker is in a limited SE-linux contexts locked down to only have access appropriate for a web-server. It can't even access remote ports (like smtp, ftp, irc, ...).
Um, honestly, the fact that most people are using computers is half the reason RIAA/MPAA/MAFIA is getting so many of these stupid laws passed. I miss the good ol days of 2400baud personally. Tech was different and so was the culture back then.
Your comment is utterly, absolutely, batshit crazy. Disconnected from reality doesn't even begin to cover it.
There is the problem... by saying "I took it to mean" you are making assumptions just as you are deriding at GP for doing. How do you KNOW that "active" for them doesn't mean "responded?"
Do they actually compare the HTML and count anything above a 95% similarity as one site? That is what they would have to do in order to be analyzing it as you assume they are. Anyone going to that trouble would, as GP suggested, provide some modicum of an explanation as to their methods if for no other reason than to say "See how cool we were?" and score geek points.
The only reason someone does not back up statistics and such, as has been pointed out here many many times, is they are meaningless if you actually say how little work went into obtaining them.
You can do the same type of thing mid-request stream with .Net and there are a number of ISAPI filters that do similar things (ISAPI_REWRITE comes to mind) if you don't want to use .Net. Finally, it's easy enough to code your own ISAPI filter to do the job just fine. In fact, if you're not a half bad coder you can develop something lighter than mod_rewrite because it does just what you need and no more.
Lastly, what I find almost funny is that most LAMP devs assume because a site is hosted on IIS that MSSQL is the backend. I've worked on a lot of IIS/.Net sites and about half are MSSQL and other half are MySQL. Each has its advantages and a smart development house will decide based on what it needs its RDBMS to do - not based on some software ethics.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
And if another guy has one IP pointing at two IIS servers in a round-robin type serving, then the count would be Apache 2, IIS 1, even though the actual install is different. It's still a better metric than just doing hostname based counting, because vhosts are MUCH more common than multiple IP servers, or even multiple server IP's. It's not perfect, but nothing is, and it sure as hell is a lot closer.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I think it's more likely that /M$ sites/ are responsible for this. M$ is running a service called "Windows Live Blogs", which has been growing in membership recently. Each blog gets its own subdomain, so each blog counts as a separate "site". M$ of course uses IIS to host its blog service, so it looks to Netcraft like IIS is gaining market share. However, the gains are totally illusory; looking at SecuritySpace confirms that the problem is with the way Netcraft counts sites.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
MS is - and always has been - an engineering shop. They never invented anything, and they don't do good design, either. What they're good at is the same thing the chinese are good at: Copy stuff from elsewhere and manufacture more of it cheaper. They're also really good at marketing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If one IIS server has one thousand sites, it is still just one IIS server installation.
If one Apache server has one thousand sites, it is still just one Apache server installation.
Any other way of counting is invalid.
The problem comes when one server has several IP's. But that would corrupt the data much less than counting sites on servers with multiple sites, since a server tends to have more sites than IP's.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Performance isn't really a problem when using Apache.
Okay, when you serve a request, you're either running a program (in some way) to generate the content, or you're serving something already on disk, using the webserver itself.
In the first case, dynamic content, the specifics of the server are going to be lost in the noise. We benchmarked my company's webserver overhead at 3ms on a 100ms request, and that's pretty typical of web applications. Getting that down to 2ms is not going to increase overall performance much.
In the second case, that of static content, there are much better servers than Apache anyway. For the sake of argument, I'll grant that IIS is twice as fast as Apache at serving static content. But it doesn't matter! Serving static content is still much faster than serving those dynamically-generated pages. A client is likely to spend far more time waiting for dynamic page generation and actual HTTP transfers than waiting for the server to start sending a static file.
And static content is instantly clusterable as well, since there's no state. logo2.png doesn't need to hit the database, I imagine, and if you're big enough to care about static content performance, you're big enough to get more than one machine anyway.
What is boils down to is that Apache is free, Free, and flexible. IIS may have improved in the latter lately, but it's hard to imagine something that can't be accomplished with Apache's module system. You can even strip it down to being able to serve bare HTTP requests, if you'd like, but why would you ever want to?
Yes, I know current versions of IIS don't even compare to, say IIS 4. I also know that Active Directory and all the other nice features enable you to set up a really great corporate network with some tough security.
Problem is: 99% of the windos admins and/or MCSE people don't know shit. There are exceptions. I've met some. They are a minority. Most corporate networks are run by what in other industries would equate to apprentices.
Yes, there are know-nothings in the Unix world, too. But they are weeded out faster because it's harder to cover your inabilities and in result the ratio is probaly reversed.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
but Microsoft products have a tendency to make n00bs of every kind *feel* they've mastered their tools, hence their natural preference.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Good grief! That radio button is the PROBLEM not the SOLUTION. I *hate* dealing with IIS and 2003 because of the GUI. No, I don't mind being able to click buttons and boxes -- much easier -- but trying to look at your configuration when a problem arises means going through all those zillion menus, boxes and buttons looking for the one that was clicked by mistake. I'd much rather just read a text config file. MUCH quicker.
Life is short: void the warranty.
I've never had any trouble configuring Apache. But then, I'm a geek. The problem isn't so much that Apache or PHP is losing out to IIS or .NET ... the problem (as we see it) is that geeks are losing out to suits.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You have provided a good link for different countries, yet did not follow up. For example, all domains are at,
/ index.html (20% ISS, 73% Apache)
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200706
now, if we go by countries we see immediately who is responsible for the boat of ISS, (see website above for source)
Germany: 5% ISS, 92% Apache
US: 21% ISS, 74% Apache
Canada: 25% ISS, 70% Apache
India: 33% ISS, 63% Apache
China: 67% ISS, 28% Apache
Now, since China is adding more net users on the web faster than any other country, we see the problem. China is skewing Netcraft.
Or you could use the COM interop to admin IIS.
Or you could use the command line tools that ship with IIS.
But dont let facts get in the way of your posting or anything.