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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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.

[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.