Nginx Overtakes Microsoft As No. 2 Web Server

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Nginx Overtakes Microsoft As No. 2 Web Server

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 4, 2012 @03:05PM from the up-and-coming dept.

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."

15 of 340 comments (clear)

Quality by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 15:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

Nginx is a great product. Not surprised.
1. Re:Quality by telekon · 2012-01-04 15:46 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
2. Re:Quality by exomondo · 2012-01-04 16:01 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  So I say, why not just call it EngineX.
  Just be thankful it's not named Libre Nginx.
3. Re:Quality by GP1911 · 2012-01-04 17:08 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  They're usually backend errors, nginx is often used as a reverse proxy.
Re:Finally! by cwj123 · 2012-01-04 15:10 · Score: 5, Funny

Wait.. BSD isn't dead?
market share v. reality by girlintraining · 2012-01-04 15:11 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
1. Re:market share v. reality by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 15:29 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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
2. Re:market share v. reality by epiphani · 2012-01-04 15:45 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
  
  --
  .
3. Re:market share v. reality by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 16:15 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The deals were public knowledge. The OEM deals of the time that resulted in the court cases were actually legal until MS was declared a monopoly. Companies have always made such deals and continue to make them, they were not anything special and only become a problem under monopoly rulings.
4. Re:market share v. reality by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 16:47 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
5. Re:market share v. reality by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 17:17 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?
  
  Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA
6. Re:market share v. reality by Dynedain · 2012-01-04 17:28 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Also, the cost of a Windows license for a small shop like that would pay for itself probably 3 times over if they had to even try to get some kind of professional support for the Linux box even once.
  A Windows license doesn't magically come with professional support. And honestly, if you need professional support for a server *NIX is going to cost you the same as an equally competant Windows admin.
  If you can't handle management of a web server in-house with qualified staff, you should move to a hosted solution. It will cost less regardless of OS choice.
  
  --
  I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Great loadbalancer by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 15:33 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
IIS will become legacy software by RoLi · 2012-01-04 18:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Finally! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-04 19:49 · Score: 5, Funny

Wait.. BSD isn't dead?
They changed its name, they call it "Mac OS X" nowadays.