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Nginx Overtakes Microsoft As No. 2 Web Server
tsamsoniw writes "With financial backing from the likes of Michael Dell and other venture capitalists, open source upstart Nginx has edged out Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) to hold the title of second-most widely used Web server among all active websites. What's more, according to Netcraft's January 2012 Web Server Survey, Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share."
In my last job, we had a client with an all Windows environment. We're talking 2 DCs, a file server, an exchange server and a dedicated IIS server on the other side of the firewall and off the domain.
One day, they decided to revamp their static HTML website (this was a government department trying to justify their existence, IT wasn't exactly at the top of their list). We talked to the outfit doing it, who told us they were using PHP. Great, I though. We can get rid of an old and outdated Windows server and replace it with a nice, lean little Linux box. Nope, I was told to install the PHP ISAPI module on IIS, because "we were a Microsoft shop", even though this server was quite literally doing nothing but serving up HTML and chewing up an unnecessary Server 2k3 license. So after much fighting, and arguing to explain that we may as well NOT go through the trouble trying to set up and debug PHP as FastCGI, another guy went behind my back and stuffed up the install, leading to me wasting 3 or 4 hours rolling it back and installing it properly. Anyway, it's all smoothed over, until I get the zip file I've been promised by the "website makers". It was indeed a website, 10 or so DreamWeaver files with the extension renamed to PHP. No Drupal theme, no Joomla install, nothing. -.- God I hate the people in this industry that like to sell themselves as professionals
Nginx is a great loadbalancer for http which makes it quite suited as a frontend and thus getting counted by netcraft . There could be hundreds of apache servers behind it . E.g. on my boxes Nginx runs as a reverse proxy in front of about 20 different apache, tomcat, more Nginx, other servers that generate some kind of html. But these 20 will all be counted as Nginx while they actually run something different. So I beleive it is quite hard to actually say what Server actually is the most popular.
There's some truth to this.
Several years ago, GoDaddy switch all of their domain parking to IIS, explicitly to get microsoft's numbers up. Throw 10,000 cnames pointed at a single machine serving up parking pages, and boom - 10,000 websites running IIS.
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Actually www is fronted by reverse proxies running on linux (you can check with nmap). IIS apparently can't handle the load by itself.
And, hotmail took a long time to convert to M$. They tried once, then had a two week outage since M$ didn't scale worth a shit. They rolled back to Solaris, and kept it that way for a _long_ time.
Fun fact. Microsoft also used sendmail on sun boxes for internal mail for a long time after exchange was introduced. M$ couldn't get their own software to scale to an enterprise as large as their own.
They're usually backend errors, nginx is often used as a reverse proxy.