Slashdot Mirror
Will Microsoft IIS Overtake Apache?
First time accepted submitter jcdr writes "February's 2014 Web Server Survey by Netcraft shows a massive increase [in the share of] Microsoft's web server since 2013. Microsoft's market share is now only 5.4 percentage points lower than Apache's, which is the closest it has ever been. If recent trends continue, Microsoft could overtake Apache within the next few months, ending Apache's 17+ year reign as the most common web server."
Netcraft says, "Microsoft gained a staggering 48 million sites this month, increasing its total by 19% â" most of this growth is attributable to new sites hosted by Nobis Technology Group." I have no idea WFT Nobis Technology Group is, but that suggests that what is essentially one large installation swings Netcraft's idea of "the most common web server."
And that's a broken way of counting. If ten servers using Server A serve ten sites each, and one server with Server B serves 1,000 sites,Server A is still the most common web server, with ten times the installation base of Server B.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Since I've unexpectedly RTFA, just a heads up, the headline is even more biased than usual. On the total number of active websites, there are still about 10x as many apache websites than IIS. Same picture for the top million busiest sites. There's almost no yearly change, and the server gaining the most marketshare is NGINX.
I'm starting to believe the hearsay: Slashdot has really been totally overrun by astroturfers (in this case paid by Microsoft). Maybe dice sells a number of "promotional posts" on a biased article to various companies, one of them being Microsoft?
This kind of thing happens on a regular basis and is usually due to Microsoft making backroom deals with operators of parked domains, probably not paying in cash but in Windows license discounts for servers or hosting. Borderline illegal and classic Microsoft - don't ever be fooled into thinking that Microsoft has gotten itself a corporate personality transplant. The active sites graph tells the real story: Microsoft continues to languish. It is beyond me why Microsoft is so fixated on manipulating Netcraft stats.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The "active" sites shows no such growth trend, in fact it shows IIS declining. NginX is the only web server showing growth, and even this is misleading. Most of our use for NginX is does not make Apache go away. We use NginX as a front end reverse proxy that talks to Apache back ends. NginX is good at a few things, but nowhere near as robust as Apache.
This is just another case of pulling only the statistics you want to color a lie.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The evidence of that is the "all sites" graph which shows IIS's share increasing vs. the "active sites" graph which shows IIS's share plummeting.
I think the most interesting graph is the last: 1 million busiest sites. The downtick of Apache looks a lot like the opposite of the uptick for nginx. For busy sites, it seems nginx is separating from Google and IIS, but at the expense of Apache.
"I don't know if Microsoft paid them, but GoDaddy did move all of their parked sites to IIS by default instead of Apache, which caused a major percentage change for Microsoft."
And why not, especially if Microsoft is paying them to do it? Those parked sites only represent a miniscule fraction of bandwidth, but as you say, make a big percentage difference in perceived market share.
Smooth move, Microsoft. You bring "lying with statistics" to a whole new level.