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

note to self..

[Anonymous Coward]

..another reason not to host on godaddy.

GoDaddy IIS

[naubrey]

Which is to say that GoDaddy hosts a lot of *parked* domains on IIS.

Re:GoDaddy IIS

[Manfre]

Which is to say that GoDaddy hosts a lot of *parked* domains on IIS.

...which were previously served using Apache. None of these stats will ever be able to convey the usefulness of site content based upon web server software.

Re:GoDaddy IIS

[whoever57]

Honest question: Why did they switch?

My WAG is that MS threw a bunch of money at Godaddy, not directly, you understand, but indirectly.

Furthermore, my conjecture is that MS is prepared to throw this money at Godaddy because Microsoft's share of sites was looking rather sad (3rd place for market share of active sites last month).

Re:GoDaddy IIS

[csumpi]

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

Sounds like a great accomplishment and major win for Microsoft.

Re:GoDaddy IIS

[Ash-Fox]

Unfortunately, I have no graphs I can share with you due to confidentiality reasons. You can get Apache to outperform Nginx by configuring Apache to use prefork, then increasing Linux's file descriptors to a much larger setting than default to coincide with the forked processes and the connection limits you wish to handle.

This is something that is done in large cloud setups used in major websites that use Apache with load balancers, or in more sophisticated networks, using BGP to perform "true load balancing" (requires a router to hash source and destination IP to maintain a connection to the same server and weight calculations).

I have not managed to get Nginx to perform as well as Apache in this configuration (prefork + increased file descriptors), or any other configuration when Apache is in this configuration. IIS in my experience doesn't do too badly with static content, however, I have never seen it outperform Apache in the 'proper' environment and configuration when it came to static content (this also included disabling modules not in use), however the differences were very minor.

I will say though, if you're using IIS for serving static content, you might not be using your money wisely. It's not really as cost effective to pay for windows licenses and machines verses just the machines (I expect GoDaddy got freebies from Microsoft). Before the argument on support - You will often find that hardware vendors like HP and IBM provide their own support for various operating system configurations and certain uses on server hardware is included with your hardware contracts, should you be a sufficiently large buyer.

It really only makes sense to run IIS if you have specific IIS/windows applications to run on the webserver like .NET applications. Costs could be reduced in such a scenario to keep IIS for static pages if it required a new breed of administrators to join a team to maintain some 'free' server option. However, if the administrators are multi-platform (like where I work), this is unlikely the case.

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

[loufoque]

IIS runs on Microsoft Windows.
GoDaddy administrators do not have the skill to manage Linux boxes.

Re:Hmm

[readingaccount]

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.

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

[evilviper]

Windows servers undoubtedly have the advantage of being able to turn up a service almost on accident, and have it minimally work. Actual administration and maintenance of them, though, is a Kafka-esque nightmare. I feel bad for Exhange admins. I've heard many horror stories of Windows support telling Admins there's no fix, no fallback, and they'll have to reinstall the entire server recreate datastores, and then they take a few months manually importing All user emails.

Linux/Unix servers take more knowledge and effort to get up and running in the first place, but then are much more stable and deterministic, handle higher load, need less babysitting, and are easier and more consistent to keep updated and make changes to, knowing you're never going to have unrelated services break, or mysterious slowdowns and service unavailability.

There's no doubt what comes out ahead in the end... Linux adminsa can mantain many times more servers than Windows admins. Consider that those Windows admins won't be free, and you'll be cash positive by hiring Linux admins in a very short time. I've worked for some of the most penny-pinching tight-wad companies around, and they emphasize Linux heavily (including on the desktops) paying their Linux admins more than even most management, and yet they heavily prefer Linuxx, and wouldn't dream ofusing Windows for anything important.

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:Hmm

[turbidostato]

"Technology changes a lot in 9 years"

Not 9 but 20 years ago I run NFS and CIFS, LDAP, Bind, Postfix... now I run NFS and CIFS, LDAP, Bind, Postfix...

No, technology doesn't change a lot, marketroid guys make it look like so to stay in the business of selling new licenses.

Re:Hmm

[benjymouse]

There are *a lot* of little things in PowerShell that makes you go "aw, that's a good idea". Things you will not find in other shells and neither in Pytho, Ruby or Perl.

Off the top of my head:

* Consistent common parameters for "impact management": You can pass a parameter called -WhatIf to every built-in command that may change persistent state. The -WhatIf parameter runs the command in simulated mode, only echoing on the console what it *would have* done. Similarly a common -Confirm parameter which asks *before* changing persistent state. It even works for scripts and functions: If you declare that your script (in a .ps1 file) "supports shouldprocess" you can pass the -WhatIf parameter to your script and PowerShell will set the whatif preference for the duration of the entire script - as if each command of the script had been passed a -whatif parameter as well.

* Commands, functions, script blocks and script files declare parameters with (optional) static types. This information is used by PowerShell to coerce values to the correct types before invocation. But the declarations can also contain declarative validation attributes, allowing the *shell* to validate parameters before invocation. Declarative validation can validate required parameters, string lengths, number/date ranges, regular expressions, value sets. The kicker here is that the script author does not need to *implement* validations, merely declare them, the information is available to the shell which can use it to both validate parameters before invocation, but *also* to report the validations through the help system. That's right, when you set up validation, help text that describes the acceptable values is automatically generated from this meta information.

And yes, even the tab completion (or intellisense in the integrated scripting environment) will pick up on the parameter type and validation. If you restrict a parameter to a certain value set, tab completion will cycle through those values when the shell determines that you request tab completion for the parameter.

* The PowerShell help system allow for in-script help text through special code comments. No need to author external help files. You can write the documentation right there in the script (using special "dot" comments), and when you do man myscript.ps1, the help system will report the documentation.

* PowerShell workflows allow scripts to suspend and resume at a later time. No, this is not the process suspend of sh shells. PowerShell actually saves the state of script execution to persistent storage and you can resume execution later, even after system restart - or on another computer. This is incredibly useful for the type of scripts that manages farms of servers and that may be running for a long time. If the script is somehow interrupted (power failure, hardware failure) it can later automatically pick up its execution from the latest savepoint. I.e. you can restart it and have it run to completion.

PowerShell is not simply a programming language. It has many features which are directly aimed at being used in a scripting setting and which are not found in general purpose language like Python or Ruby.

Re:1st post.

[ackthpt]

apache 4 life!

No kidding. I hate IIS right now. It's so much more time consuming to sort out configuration issues with than Apache.

Removed parked sites

[Todd Knarr]

In my book, the stats ought to be excluding "parked" sites, ones which don't have any content beyond a parking page. I'd also exclude sites whose only content is boilerplate advertising (eg. the one you get if you're on Cox Cable's internet service and type a nonexistent domain into your browser). I'm more interested in what servers are being used for productive work without the numbers being skewed by the guy who registered 10,000 domains related to the latest fad and is waiting to see which ones he can sell at a profit.

Re:1st post.

[Anonymous Coward]

There hasn't been any serious security holes in IIS for years now. So the government ordered MS to add PHP support.

Not the first time either

[MrNemesis]

Dupe! ...and the knock-on.

I'm beginning to wonder if GoDaddy's web server policy follows the solar cycle... :)

From the look of Netcraft's graph, prior to the GoDaddy move it looked like most of the marketshare lost from apache went straight into nginx (itself also frequently used as a caching proxy/frontend to another web server on the backend) so I'm not quite sure what the summary/TFA are trying to imply.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/04/02/april-2013-web-server-survey.html

Rubbish

[Tough Love]

it's Microsoft IIS that has picked up share.

No. Microsoft picked up a bunch of parked domains and its long term trend is still down, even for parked domains. In terms of active sites, Microsoft's trend is steadily down, now around 12% and sinking. And it is indeed nginx that is mainly picking up share from Apache, though Google is hanging in there pretty well too. This puff piece glosses over the one fact that can't be denied: Linux servers rule the web by a large and increasing margin.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/08/09/august-2013-web-server-survey.html#more-12060

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

[93 Escort Wagon]

Netcraft's report shows the percentages for all domains as well as for active domains.

This article is a bit sensationalistic - no surprise. As a percentage of all domains, Microsoft is at 23% (Apache's at 47%). Looking at just non-parked domains, they're at 12% (versus 54% for Apache). Not really much of a "Apache vs. IIS" story there...

If there's any news at all, it's that servers other than Apache and IIS have managed to gain significant traction over the past couple of years. I remember when it had really turned into a two horse race, and gains by one exactly mirrored losses by the other. But now it's a bit more of a healthy competition.

Re:Citation needed - When/why did GoDaddy switch?

[dltaylor]

The originally-linked Yahoo finance page is expired, but here's the /. discussion from 2006:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/03/23/008229/godaddycom-dumps-linux-for-microsoft

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.

[smash]

Be that as it may (I hate the IIS administration interface as well), for an enterprise who runs microsoft on the desktop, microsoft SQL, and other microsoft services, IIS integrates far easier into that environment.

And I suspect this is where it is winning share - the web isn't static pages any more.

Sure, Apache can do this, but the environment is totally foreign to your average corporate type.

And as usual, security is probably some way down the priority list.

Re:1st post.

[MightyMartian]

IIS is an absolute fucking nightmare when you have to deal with a buggered up config. Actually that applies to most MS point and click services. Apache can be a bastard, but at least I can back up the configs with a quick "cp".

Worst experience I ever had was with IIS and Exchange and something going wonky with IIS's settings, and OMA completely screwing up. In the end I literally had to uninstall IIS. Only MS would build things with such fragility and such insanely dangerous solutions.

fork() vs epoll()

[NynexNinja]

I think when Nginx first came on the scene (a little bit after libevent was released), Apache had known about the scalability problems associated with using fork() versus epoll(). This was almost a decade ago. Apache has yet to provide a scalable implementation using epoll similar to what Nginx provides. Its at least a 10x speed improvement on the same hardware.

All that I can say is that all new installations over the past I'd say about 5 years, I've been doing using Nginx only because Apache just can't scale well with their fork() implementation compared to Nginx. I'd say this has something to do with people leaving Apache, at least all the people I know.

Re:1st post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your gripe should be with the fine PHP people, not the Apache project.

Re:it is getting a LOT better

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the language, it's the community. Google "php mysql" and the first link teaches you how to create a SQL Injection point. And 'experienced' PHP developers still write code that way. I'm convinced they just don't care.

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

[93 Escort Wagon]

Actually, looking at the raw numbers... it's just shy of 90%! But even for Apache, something like 70% of sites are not "active" by Netcraft's metrics - and it's a similar story with all the others.

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...

Re:1st post.

[TheRaven64]

And people say Microsoft doesn't innovate. Making something that's more painful to configure than Apache requires an impressive amount of R&D...

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.