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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."
Is this the possible result of Microsoft converting Godaddy's parked domains to Windows servers?
More
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/05/01/may_
The person above asked if there's any compelling reason not to use apache.
I think the question to ask is if there's any compelling reason not to use IIS. I'm sure people will spew "because it's Microsoft and you dont want your website hacked", but that's not what I'm talking about. IIS has had some problems in the past, but these days it's pretty good.
The question is when an organization already has an investment in Windows, and local domains, management tools etc....is there any reason not to use IIS? Does apache provide anything above and beyond what IIS provides when it comes to general website hosting?
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.
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...
Apache has a vast majority of sites with longest uptime.
IIS already has a pretty dramatic marketshare lead when it comes to the Fortune 1000.
If you are using Visual Studio dotNet as your development environment you are not going to find Apache works too well.
The netcraft survey is bunk because it measures a quantity that has always been irrelevant. In the past the market share of Apache was artificially inflated because most parked domains would sit on Apache boxes. Now Microsoft has identified that as an issue they are starting to get the advantage.
The quantity of interest is not who supplies the Web server but what the development platform is. As a practical matter any code of interest can run on ISS but rather less can run on Apache and less again on LAMP.
And there is no guarantee that the code engine will be visible in any case. You could easily have an IIS back end written in dotNET being served up through a squid front end.
And the rate of use says nothing as to whether the software is any damn good. There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
I believe that netcraft is counting sites, not servers. As such, consolidating servers would not explain netcraft's numbers.
*sigh* back to work...
In the last 5 years... I went to 2 Universities. One of them was a crappy, private University whose entire program focused on Microsoft. It was one of those afterwork, pay us a lot of money for a degree thing. I left that place and went to a State University(soon to be the largest in the state). I was shocked to find out from the CS majors that they had a large Microsoft Curriculum as well. Apparently, Microsoft gives a lot of money to the Universities to ensure that they are a central part the curriculum. Since a lot of students are learning about ASP, Visual Basic and .NET... is it any surprise that these same students are going into the workplace and using these tools instead of a perl, php, ruby, python inside of Apache.
There is also a serious discrepancy in that other stats seem to show IIS on the last moments of extinction in hi-tech zones like Germany. NetCraft report doesn't really have any explanation of the figures it presents.
What's really problematic is that over time NetCraft has become less informative. No mention has been made lately of what the changes in market share are attributed to. In years past, even a percent or two got a few lines of explanation or analysis. Did one of the service packs or 'security' upgrades install and turn on IIS for all Windows users? Or are more domain parkers and cybersquatters using IIS in the server identification string?
This downturn started last year when MS paid GoDaddy to swap out (or claim to swap out) its domain parking. GoDaddy did get the OSS community to lay off by throwing some chump change to OpenSSH and we can see the result of these last 12+ months. The money did some good, but if it's just a one-off donation, then it's questionable whether then benefit offsets the harm. Either way it's funny to see GoDaddy decision makers thinking they can buy indulgences. Maybe it ought to become an annual fee.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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Here are several GUI administration tools for Apache.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
One IP number can represent dozens of name virtual hosts. So if you count IP numbers you get stats favoring IIS, which has closer to a 1:1 ratio (or worse) of machine to web presence. If you count hostnames, you get stats favoring all other HTTP servers.
And if you limit your survey to HTTP compliance then you eliminate all IIS sites. Add in TCP/IP compliance and you eliminate anything hosted on MS Windows, accidentally, out of ignorance or otherwise not just IIS but also Lighttpd and Apache.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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).
In case you haven't noticed, the brain-trust at Microsoft doesn't sit still, and they have the financial and monopolistic resources to try and try again until they get it right. Moreover, as C# and .NET have shown, when you get the right people involved (Anders Hejlsberg) on making an in-house version of a very compelling technology (Java), Microsoft is more than capable at delivering a winner.
In the case of IIS 7, they have finally decided to create a Windows webserver in the modular blueprint of Apache. The betas of IIS 7 show that performance and security are better than anything that's come before it -- not just any IIS, but any webserver. Hell, the guys at Zend are saying that Zend on IIS 7 will be the most robust way to deploy PHP! And this is all built on the evolved form of Windows 2003 server, which has been the most secure O/S ever released by MS, something that a even a n00b with one weekend of training can lock down as tight as your favorite flavor or Linux.
Rather than stand around and argue about it, y'all need to get to work on Apache 3... and get ready to play catchup to MS again. The insecure days of IIS 5 are long gone; you've got your work cut out for you.
I personally think IIS is a superior webserver to Apache. I speak as someone who's had to administer both systems, and like anything each has thier own quirks + benefits etc, but crucially...
Apache is not as modular as IIS (v7 that is). IIS7 you can literally strip it so bare, all it can do is send empty HTTP 200 responses - an absolute shell of a webserver. Not even file html/file-system support. Want disk-access? Turn on disk-access module. Want asp.net? Turn on the asp.net module. Absolutely everything (and really, everything) is a module that can be ripped out.
IIS6+ deals with HTTP requests at a kernel level. That is core functionality such as responses, caching, etc are all dealt with at ring0. Performance is unbeatable.
Oh and security? IIS6 has never been rooted, ever. Add-ons have been (asp.net for instance), but IIS6 has never been.
Oh, and it's locked down by default. And easy to administer.
In my opinion Linux is probably the better OS to host a webserver on, but IIS does spank Apache all over I'm afraid - mainly for the stated reasons above.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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
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
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.
Even accounting for the GoDaddy domain-parking nonsense, there's not much to these numbers. An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods. It's demonstrably bunk. While quantitative evidence is out there regarding applications and numbers of users per server, I think the following anecdotal bit sums it up nicely.
.NET. And it's a BIG pile.
.NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.
...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.
.NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for . Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache. The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS. By all indication from MS consultants, this is not a unique event.
In a very large quasi-governmental organization, we have a major application that runs on a handful of Oracle systems and serves double-digit thousands of people with acceptable performance over the last half dozen years. There is an ill-thought-out project underway (a year into development) to replace this with a steaming pile of
How big? Follow me on this one: First they modeled the
Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app. Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.
The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks
So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the
In the immortal words of Stan Lee: 'Nuff said.
I think not...(*poof*)
Apache is neat. Very neat.
...
.Net. Look at the countless Linux people flocking to Mac OS X to see what I mean.
.Net and whatever from MS not sucking to much is a reaction to the pressure the feel from OSS. They may be reacting to this, thus the rise in IIS hits.
PHP is neat. Very neat.
Compared to any other SSI solution that is.
...etc.
There is but one problem. The world and especially the web and it's technologies is moving along at a breathtaking pace. Apache is neat, but it's style of configuration is nearly 10 years old from back when XML was considered the hottest thing since sliced bread.
Why isn't there a zero-fuss web interface backend built into Apache that enables me to configure anything I want with 3 clicks of a mouse (with a backend deactivation option of course). Why isn't there a version of PHP with a MySQL driven persistance layer and SQL-free serialisation built right into it?
How come a little bit of marketing, screencasts and a website which, for once, doesn't look like shit, and suddenly people think Rails is the holy grail of webdeving? Rails and the hip project hype they kicked off is a very good thing, but it shouldn't stop just there.
Don't get me wrong. I'm convinced that Microsoft, in terms of available software technology, is an incarnation of evil and should be avoided at all costs unless there is a solid reason not to. 'Client wants Exchange' could be one. But we have to be realistic about this. It takes only a handfull of people at MS with 2 or more braincells, freshly assigned decision power and half a billion out of Microsofts piggybank to build an entire webstack that blows any OSS solution (Zope, Rails, Django and whatnot included) out of the water and into next wednesday, technology wise. Even the most advanced OSS webstack today has superfluos installation fuss one has to go through that should disapear ASAP. There is a lure of a truely zero-fuss
IIS,
Then again, MS bought Godaddy just to raise their level of IIS installs by a few percent, and LAMP machines are extremely Multi-Domain friendly. This Necraft study might just be reflecting this. And I have no doubt that should Apache drop to a real 30%, they'd get their shit together and start building a full integrated OSS webstack that picks up where Zope ends. And not only halfway there. I hope so anyway.
My 2 Eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Help me! Seriously, I need a new technology.
I like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as much as the next want-to-be web developer out there.
Started with FAMP (FreeBSD), to LAMP, to LAPP (PostgreSQL)...
But now I'm ridiculously on LLPR! (Linux, Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, Ruby)
Can someone please develop something with a vowel?!?
The television will not be revolutionized.
Subsection A, Paragraph B clearly states that boat analogies must be used in lieu of car analogies on all Microsoft vs. OSS stories. We just don't have the technology to construct a metaphorical car powerful enough to overcome the figurative bullshit.
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.