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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."
I'm firmly convinced the main reason IIS is even in the top 10 is because so many large corporations sign secret agreements with Microsoft to get discounted software in exchange for not using "free" or "open source" software. No joke -- I am working at a company right now where it is banned, and the only reason given is either that "info security" said so, or "legal" did. But when pressed, nobody can quite identify why. It's just policy, and nobody questions it. IIS' market share is vastly inflated; If it weren't for these clandestine agreements, I sincerely doubt it would be deployed very often, even WITH all the MS tech tie-ins, there's too many compelling reasons not to use it. Even Microsoft doesn't use it on it's major websites because it doesn't scale and it is prone to failure.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Why is the Google icon on the post when its MS that got overtaken. Is Nginx run by Google?
I was also going to speculate/wonder if it was one of those "rigged" deals, like a few years back when IIS was declared as "overtaking firefox" and becoming #1 because "most web sites on the web used it". The actual reason was that GoDaddy (which hosts a vast majority of "parked" domains) was paid-off (or "otherwise incented" by Microsoft to switch to IIS. So when you considered a "www." to be a "unique site", and 99% of "unique sites" to be garbage parked-domains, IIS was not the leader.
So, I wonder if some other bizarre statistical work is at-play. For example, does someone like Akamai, who hosts a lot of other people's sites, use Nginx to skew these numbers??
1) Hell yes, it's easier to configure than Apache. Has most of the plugins you could want from Apache, whilst being much more lightweight.
2) I'll echo the other comment here, YOU HAVE THE SOURCE CODE. Worry about backdoors in IIS from the U.S. Gov't., nginx has way more eyes on it.
3) You eventually figured out the pronunciation. Most of the people I know that use GNU/Linux and LaTeX ca't pronounce GNU or LaTeX, but they work great so they get used. What's the problem?
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
I'm glad such a program, well designed and programmed in good old C, is rewarded with trust and confidence from more and more engineers.
: ... really a piece of cake
I have been using it for two years, serving several professional sites, and the transition from the initial Apache setup was surprisingly smooth.
What I like in particular, compared to Apache
- fantastic performance gain, in terms of cpu and memory
- maintenance gain: the configuration appears (at least to me) to be more "developer like", and easier to configure/extend with many options
- load balancing is
The only drawback I (initially) found was the lack of a PHP embedded/module. But using php-fpm happened to be a good alternative, via a local port.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
no, this is genuine. it has been steadily gaining popularity over the past several years.
nginx is being developed by a russian guy who up until recently was working (as a sysadmin, apparently) for one of the major russian web portals where nginx originated as an in-house project first but was open-sourced. the guy has now left the company (which has been slowly dying anyway) and incorporated an llc or something, focused on nginx. it was already quite popular in russia 5-6 years ago (when i was still living there).
nginx is an efficient event-driven front-end server, quite often used for loadbalancing in front of traditional apache or tomcat or whatever other backends, but in a simple case of a LAMP server it can be hooked up directly to PHP via FPM or FCGI.
config syntax is quite expressive, with quite advanced uri / header - based rewriting capabilities. there is even a built-in Perl interpreter for more advanced use (which tends to be abused by people who forget what being an event-driven server means by sticking logic in there... oh well, people use things like node.js too *shudder*).
I am quite surprised. nginx may be a good product, but it's also lacking a lot of functionality that a web server used as a load balancer or cache should support. For example, it doesn't support HTTP 1.1 to the backend, thus it can't do name based virtual hosts on the servers it caches.
I *WANTED* to use nginx for a large multi-tennant website we were building, but it didn't support it.
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Nonsense. IIS will become a legacy product
The share in Japan, Germany, Russia and many other countries already lies below 4% for many years. But also traditionally Microsoft-friendly countries can turn away from IIS, for example in the last 10 years, the share in France fell from 35% to 5%, in Brazil and Taiwan from over 45% to 15% and in India even from 65% to 18%.
IIS will probably be able to hold out another 10 years, but in the long term it's future is far from rosy.