Apache Web Server Share Falls Below 50 Percent For First Time Since 2009

darthcamaro writes "Apache has always dominated the web server landscape. But in August, its share has slipped below 50 percent for the first time in years. The winner isn't nginx either — it's Microsoft IIS that has picked up share. But don't worry, this isn't likely a repeat of the Netscape/IE battle of the late 90's, Apache is here to stay (right?)" The dip is mostly the result of GoDaddy switching to IIS from Apache. Which is to say GoDaddy hosts a whole lot of sites.

Comments

Hmm

[Tailhook]

The statistical effect of millions of empty, neglected GoDaddy hosted sites will not ultimately mean a great deal. It does raise a question for me, however; what benefit does GoDaddy hope to realize with IIS? My last contact with IIS was about 9 years ago. At that time it was fragile, insecure and plagued with mysterious "metabase" corruption problems. The thought of using such a thing for large scale hosting seems absurd and I've ignored it ever since.

Has it since improved enough to entice really large operations?

Re:Hmm

[DuckDodgers]

Linux isn't harder to administer because of any inherent problems, it's harder for the average person to administer because we probably had Windows in the home computer and at the office, and at the school. Making the jump from Windows 95 to Windows NT or from Windows Vista to Server 2008 is a lot easier than jumping from Windows to Linux.

If you're a serious power-user administrator, Linux and Unixes in general has been easier to administer than Windows Server for a very long time. You have more interoperable shell tools at your disposal. The Server GUI is better for an admin novice, but terminal tools are quicker for a power user than toggling through programs and hunting through menus. Microsoft is catching up with PowerShell, but even if the technology is extremely flexible and mature (and it may well be), they took the odd step of inventing a new syntax different enough to be confusing to people comfortable with bash or cmd.exe - me among them. Now I'm asking myself whether making the investment in Powershell is worthwhile. It probably is, but I don't look forward to it.

Re:Hmm

[smash]

+1. Powershell is quirky. It is prettty excruciatingly slow. There are bugs. But it really is pretty neat, and nothing similar exists in the Unix world as yet. If you need to admin Windows boxes, you'd definitely be well advised to learn powershell.

Re:Hmm

[DaveAtFraud]

You basically just admitted that Linux boxes are harder to administer than Windows servers. This makes Linux servers much less appealing for companies when you can find Windows server admins for a dime a dozen, but Linux admins are harder to find and generally cost a lot more.

Er, no. Windows makes the easy things easy (pick what you want from the list rather than, horror of horrors, type something) but still hasn't succeeded in making the difficult easy. This lulls people who think they know what they're doing into jumping into the deep end and finding out they can't swim. Lots of things when setting up a server (web or otherwise) that require an understanding of the underlying networking. The Windows admins who don't know this are the ones who are "a dime a dozen." The ones that do can create a secure, functional site with Windows but wish they had Linux since it's easier and more secure and faster and more flexible and....

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Hmm

[MightyMartian]

My experience with Powershell is sufficient to state that Windows users can keep it. Bash is a far far more mature shell with a helluva more lineage and experience behind it.

Re:GoDaddy IIS

[LoRdTAW]

Simple: asp.net. Plenty of half assed coders out there can, with little effort, build a website using Visual Basic or C#.

Microsoft was paying large hosts to switch $10 sit

[raymorris]

A while back Microsoft was paying hosts and registrars with large numbers of domains parked, or $30 / year type, to switch over.
I don't know if that program is still active.

Uh, didn't godaddy switched over years ago?

[the_B0fh]

why is it that everytime I read about a dip in apache stats, it's because of godaddy switching over? Bloody hell, they've been switching over for years, just how many effing sites do they have?

Re:1st post.

[micheas]

It was mostly due to microsoft cutting a check to godaddy to not show apache traffic server in the headers.

Godaddy runs IIS on linux. Well, they run IIS behind apache traffic server so which webserver to count as the webserver is a bit of an academic question. The moral here is that godaddy hosts a lot (hundreds of thousands, if not millions) of inactive sites that they collect 9.95 or so a year for hosting.

Re:1st post.

[Zenin]

You can backup IIS's config just the same. It's just an XML file (and a surprisingly easy to read/understand one at that).

You can also do your config by editing it as well, although typically you'll use something like AppCmd or more modernly PowerShell.

It's frankly easier to reliably automate/script IIS configuration changes than Apache. Apache's configuration system is incredibly powerful and at times that's needed, but that power also means it's effectively impossible for a random admin script to make sense of it enough to modify. Such a tool must intrinsically know not just Apache's config system...but your specific implementation with it. AppCmd and PowerShell can pretty reliably walk into nearly any IIS setup, no matter how convoluted, and safely make additions, tweaks, etc.

Frankly I'm first and foremost an Apache fan, have been since it was literally A Patchy Server. And I still deploy it more often than not, often in front of IIS to get some clever hack done that just isn't practical in IIS.

But that said...I'm warming up to IIS, especially as C#/.Net gains major traction in the wake of Oracle's kiss of death to Java.

Re:Microsoft was paying large hosts to switch $10

[gbjbaanb]

IIRC, GoDaddy switched to IIS for these parked domains and a dip in Apache usage appeared, then reversed itself a year or so later... now its repeating.

Seems more like a money-making initiative fromGoDaddy, or a money-losing initiative from MS yet again. What's the chances history will repeat itself once the contract runs out...

Prefork is the worse MPM for performance

[kervin]

Prefork plus increased file descriptors? You're kidding right? While you can get Apache to match NGinx, it's definitely nowhere that simple. As optimized as Unix fork() is, processes are going to use more resources than threads in this scenario every time. Prefork is the worse MPM you can use when you need performance. Even the Apache manual spells this out.

You'd have *begin* with worker or event MPM, use Apache 2.4 at least, and finely tune for your Application and specific load.

The benefit of NGinx is that you get a highly optimized web server right out of the box. You don't have to mess with the configs and you're almost there.

Technically the Apache team can do the same if they get rid of Prefork and a whole bunch of decades old legacy configuration options. Remove code processing modules from the webserver application space, i.e. get rid of mod_php for php_fpm, etc. All this can be configured now and you'll get that speed and stability, but it's just not done out of the box.

With NGinx it is. The only way to do things is the 'fast' or optimized way.

Re:base it on traffic vs. how many domains host'd

[IwantToKeepAnon]

The Netcraft graphs show "Google" as a platform, last I read (a couple years ago granted) that google ran a customized version of apache. Does google now offer a honest-to-goodness webserver of its own? Or can googles #'s be added into the apache category? And what about Tomcat sites? Are they already included in the apache #'s?

Thanks for the link.