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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."
With so many botnets taking over IIS, it seems only fair.
Are you kidding?
Unless you're hosting simple static web pages IIS is better in almost every way, easier to manage, easier to configure, etc...
It's by far the best web server, no dependencies on old fashioned 40+ year old "Unix" legacy technologies, with support for the full suite of modern Windows infrastructure. There really is no other choice for anyone who is a professional web developer.
They went MS-Only where I work last year, traded in the Novell networking gear. MS has some sort of nonsense called "active directory" that all the pointy haired bosses love, and iinm you almost have to be 100% MS.
But really, it doesn't make much difference to me, now that I'm retiring and no longer will have to deal with MS's crappy software. God but I hate Access and Outlook (Excel's still the best spreadsheet, but I hate all spreadsheets).
Free Martian Whores!
Apache is turning into one of the dinosaurs of the information age, being overtaken by the likes of Nginx and Lighttpd left and right but refusing to die already. IIS also is hardly the crippled pile of steaming crap which it used to be.
And the closest competition is nginx, not IIS.
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
Developer January 2014 Percent February 2014 Percent Change
Apache 98,129,017 54.50% 94,741,928 52.68% -1.81
nginx 21,548,550 11.97% 24,206,737 13.46% 1.49
Microsoft 20,901,626 11.61% 21,196,966 11.79% 0.18
Google 15,386,518 8.54% 15,245,912 8.48% -0.07
Nginx instances are rapidly replacing apache setups , so this should be IIS vs Nginx
xkcd.com/... anybody?
One needs to look beyond the first graph that shows all sites surveyed to look at the actually active sites - there Apache appears to have more *active* deployments than the rest combined. Counting inactive, parked domains is not really indicative of particular server popularity.
NETCRAFT IS DEAD!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Again Slashdot?
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
On a completely unrelated topic, Microsoft records record profits: http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Apache is dying.
Parked domains are a pretty poor measure.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Look at the graphs for 'Web server developers: Market share of active sites' and 'Web server developers: Market share of the top million busiest sites'. No need for concern unless your site is hosted using IIS.
Exactly. A bit of sensationalism in the story.
All Sites (included millions of parked) are in 38%/%32 mix. Looking 600 pixels down and you see the active (non parked sites). The percentage is 52% vs 11%. The big drop in for MS in 2009 was probably a nail in the coffin...
Also, BSD is dying ...
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 is a count of sites running web services, right? Not volume served out by each brand of server.
Microsoft has had the practice of starting IIS on practically every server for the purpose of providing a web management interface. In some cases, without informing the system admin.
Anecdote:
Many years ago, when I managed a few Intranet sites at Boeing (SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, Linux), we had a variant of the Code Red worm infecting IIS systems. Admins of *NIX systems could see the propagation of the worm payload in our web logs, even though our systems were immune*. We collected the source IPs of infected systems and turned them over to computing security. The next thing we knew, we'd get calls from Windows server admins, claiming that their systems could not be infected, as they were not running IIS. "Look again." Configuring many services automatically triggers a start of IIS. And now you've got a service running that the admins don't know that they have to keep patched. So even when Microsoft released a fix, it never got applied since many admins figured it wasn't applicable to them. I would venture a guess that most Windows Server (and many client) systems are running IIS, even if it only displays the default installation page.
*Typical Apache/*NIX systems just replied with a 404 since the target DLL didn't exist. But I wrote a Perl CGI that would capture the query source and fire back a Windows popup message to the effect that their machine was broadcasting an infection. I was surprised to see how many people with client (desktop) systems called me to ask when was going on.
Have gnu, will travel.
In the world of Open Source, I would also like to see the sum total of Open Source web servers VS. IIS:
Nginx http://www.nginx.org/ ( really popular and at least this is in one of the graphs)
Lighttpd http://www.lighttpd.net/ (personally, I have found many reasons use this one in the past and I'm sure I will again)
Cherokee http://www.cherokee-project.co... (yet to explore past a basic setup)
Roxen Webserver http://www.roxen.com/products/... (Still need to take for a spin)
And then special purpose web servers.
HTTP Explorer http://http-explorer.sourcefor...
HFS HTTP File Server http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/
At least that's all I can think of. Anybody else?
I know some of these take up negligible market share, but I would still like to see their market share lumped together.
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This is due to GoDaddy shifting to IIS and now WHM/cPanel/Enkompass.. So, don't take this as the industry shifting when its not. GoDaddy has 10,000's of websites they host.
Microsoft cannot any further afford the wages of their long standing chair-flinging American CEO; so they went and hired a cheapo H1B visa Indian instead. Microsoft's demise is imminent.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I recently became acquainted with it at work, and it's actually quite nice to work with, I must say.
Still, this post reminds me quite a lot of the xkcd about extrapolating off of one data point. It seems unlikely that IIS will overtake Apache; more likely there was a one-time shift due to some particular event.
Looks like obfuscation to me, and so not accurate.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
hmmm.
I'm a dick and you're a swallower.
Nobis Tech is the holding company of Ubiquity Hosting. Web hosting & cloud services, so probably a lot of those sites are hosted on virtual servers. The company might have popped into some site admins' field of view when they seemed to have a little problem last spring (namely, hosting tons of spam servers), this problem has apparently been dealt with (though not before some people were prompted to modify their .htaccess files to block all addresses registered to Ubiquity/Nobis).
At the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he had 150 impersonators in the US. Now, according to calculations I spotted in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement recently, there are 85,000. Intriguingly, that means one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. More disturbingly, if Elvis impersonators continue multiplying at the same rate, they will account for a third of the worldâ(TM)s population by 2019.
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/...
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
AC ... How is "tripleevenfall" any better than AC?
My guess is this is largely driven by the push to use Sharepoint.
Perhaps the NSA's FOXACID servers (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/jacob-appelbaum-30c3-protect-infect-militarization-internet-transcript.html) have been modified to pretend to be IIS now, and that has confused the reporting.
Apache is getting phased out by the likes of nginx. This just in, Windows phone has finally over taken Android 0.9, I guess Windows wins! wait, they have an Android 2.0?! When did this happen?
If you're going to measure web server market share, wouldn't it make sense to measure, I don't know, the actual number of web servers? A single IIS server serving 10,000 domains should count as 1, not 10,000.
The methodology they want is:
forEach IP, connect to port 80,443 and, if alive, register which web server responds and then select count(*),web_server from results group by web_server.
However even that is flawed since it's been basic security practice for a decade now to change the way your server identifies itself.
No.
A hosting company that mainly hosts spam sites. Together with their parent company they have large swathes of bots on various small /26 IP ranges registered to them which seems intended to be to prevent other companies from easily blocking a large IP range.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Apparently so.
Real talk: Apache is pretty shitty, and IIS is vastly improved over the old days.
I prefer a different headline... So finally after nearly 20 years, Microsoft can win (on one of many benchmarks) from a bunch of amateurs ;-).
nosig today
http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/web_server
Now back in your corner!
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Apache is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Apache community when IDC confirmed that Apache market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Apache has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Apache is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Apache's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Apachefaces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Apache because Apache is dying. Things are looking very bad for Apache. As many of us are already aware, Apache continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
All major surveys show that Apache has steadily declined in market share. Apache is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Apache is to survive at all it will be among web server dilettante dabblers. Apache continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save Apache from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Apache is dead.
Fact: Apache is dying
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.
If 10,000 Web sites are served from one server using Apache, and 100 Web sites are served from 100 servers using IIS, it would be reasonable to interpret that Apache is the more common choice for serving Web sites. It would be reasonable--not necessarily accurate, but in a vacuum decision there is a great chance of validity--to assume that Apache is the better choice for hosting Web sites in most cases, as it has been selected for more often. It would be very reasonable to assume that Apache is, in most cases, at least adequate--a satisfiser would find this palatable--while making no assumptions on whether it is more or less optimal than IIS.
It's silly to assume that the number of servers has any real meaning, unless it can reflect resource use--at our resolution we can't even do that (are these 100 IIS servers run from Raspberry Pi, or 100 IIS servers run from ginormous Dell R620s? How much load?). Even then, that doesn't reflect all the other decisions put into it. On the other hand, there are very real questions like "Does my ASP.NET site run better on Apache?" and the answer is no; or like, "Does my Python/cherrypi site run better through WSGI/Apache or WSGI/IIS?" and the answer is no again.
The raw number of Web sites run on Apache reflects a lot more than the number of discrete servers. But then you have questions like: are these Perl/PHP/Python, .NET, etc.? Essentially: are they Apache/IIS sites because of Apache/IIS, or because of the system that provides facilities for the site best also providing Apache/IIS support best?
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Would you use IIS instead of apache?
Do you know anyone who would?
Have you ever heard about anyone who would?
Have you ever heard about anyone who knows anyone who would?
The answer to all above questions is the same as the one to the question in subject. No.
That's the number I'd really like to see.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
>This is a big deal in a competitive market
Web servers are not a competitive market though.
Apache, nginx and tomcat are all free. You can even run them on Windows if
you really wanted.
The real story here is the rise of nginx in the top one million sites graph. Mostly at the expense of Apache.
Transparency.
1999 called. They want their browser war back, but they'll settle for a httpd war.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Here in the northeast we have a winter storm warning getting 10-16 inches overnight so i went to check if there were any early school closings http://closings.cbs6albany.com... And sure enough its down i think theres a few parents hammering the refresh button. So i went to netcraft and sure enough its Windows Server 2008 Microsoft-IIS/7.5. :/
Someone I know runs a hosting provider in Latin America, they sell virtualization, dedicated servers and housing. I don't remember exactly how the deal was (this was about 2 years ago). Microsoft talks to everyone here to route their traffic through Window Server devices and IIS or fake server agents in exchange of money, hardware and licenses. I don't have proof and can't obviously point to specific providers, but i've seen the devices myself.
134,194,577 NON IIS VS 21,196,966 IIS
I mostly know a site is crap when I get an IIS error when loading a page. I rarely get a similar view of breakage showing other servers' error messages, execpt maybe 404s on dead links (which is fair enough, because no httpd can run when the server is in a skip). So, this means either 1) IIS leads to broken sites or 2) people who use IIS can't do websites, or I suspect, both together.
IIS is great if you don't want to bother learning the ins and outs of your server software, and you don't have that many to deploy.
Go deploy 200+ IIS servers then tell me they are easier to manage than apache.
Then go install the URLRewrite module, and try getting support from Microsoft when it threadlocks on you.
And yes, I've used Apache, IIS and Nginx extensively in large scale production sites. IIS ranks 3rd in the bunch in my book for stability and easy of management. It does do fairly well in performance but only if your apps are .NET. Any other language and nginx/apache solidly smokes it.
Or, ya know, large solid blocks of IPv4 addresses are getting scarce
Got to feed the anti-MS trolls..
Netcraft.com: "In the February 2014 survey we received responses from 920,102,079 site"
.. Apache: 62.5%, Nginx: 18.2%, Microsoft-IIS: 14.4%"
W3tech.com: "Usage of web servers for websites
Oh. My. God. I knew this topic would be rampant with trolls, but I had no idea how retarded it would actually be. Nobody seems to even question the numbers in the OFA, and everyone is for some idiotic reason lowering themselves to the point of debating IIS vs. Apache. You FOOLS. This is just silly.
.net MVC is something to fall in love with. Not sure how anyone can go back to rails or anything else on Apache after having a taste.
From Nobis Web site (sounds dodgy just from the language):
"Nobis Technology Group, LLC is the parent holding company to roughly a dozen specialized companies and a broad spectrum of websites. We are privately-held, employee-owned, and have been involved in a number of very lucrative Internet services companies of many names since 2002."
I don't trust NoScript to let them further out of the box for their alleged web site to tell me more.
Where I work, we get windows server 2003,2008,2012 for free, with iis. But when we need a webserver, we spin up a Linux box or VM. We've got at least fifteen apache servers alone in my department, and only one solitary asp.net server. Windows makes good SMB servers, but terrible web servers.
I haven't used IIS in a while has it gotten any better from 5 years ago?
Most of what I run across today is nginx running reverse proxy for whatever services you want running behind it.
Or, ya know, large farms of vhosting webservers are prone to attack but one vhost being attacked and sending spam shouldn't negatively impact all other customers at the hosting company.
IIS is Isis's sis
That Apache had to save
From her hirsute marital bliss
With abundant
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I just filled out some survey a few years ago and they continue to give me serials on my msdn account.
Built in web-based management/configuration gui, XML-based server-side markup with iterators and flow control etc, RCS based file system, replication, etc... And that's just the features it had in 1995.
Right, I'm tagging this article betteridge, as this article is a classic case of it applying.
Hang on, where are the tags? What the hell has happened to Slashdot? Oh, I see we can edit them on the front page, but not in the article itself any more.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...when you need several IIS instances to do the job of one apache instance, it doesn't surprise me.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nobis
nobis
for us, to us; dative plural of ego
because, who runs a windows web server?
Changing versions of Apache used to be a breeze, but then there was that apache2 config file mess awhile back that was just horrible, and half the people I talked to about it were looking around for something else.
It is not possible to overstate the importance of make config; make; make install. When you find yourself justifying agony to your userbase by saying "Oh, but our new version offers so many great features that we cannot possibly be backward compatible" then it's time to stop programming and let someone else take over.
But isn't IIS a whole lot better than Apache? Yours sincerely.. Bill G.
(disclaimer, I'm a fan of "use what works" and prefer open-source; but my daily job and freelance stuff has often been on a Microsoft stack)
MVC. Oh yeah, and legacy aspx.
That should say enough. MVC is *dead easy* to dev against and, in the process, produce good code. I'm not running down other frameworks and languages (another disclaimer: I've used and loved at least 12 languages including PHP and Python; I've dealt with CGI; all tools with a reasonable following must have some merit or they wouldn't have a following). I'm just saying this: it's super-easy to get an html5-compliant, fast, well-separated, unit-testable (indeed, TDD-driven) website out of the MVC stack. You almost have to try not to. Cake is cool. Rails is nice. Again, cool your jets -- I'm not running down your tech. But MVC/VS201(2|3)/Entity/SQL Server (2012 express handles a 10 gig db and it's free!) make your average and even above-average sites dev a breeze.
So yeah, I'm not fond of IIS. But I totally understand why it's getting traction. The toolchain, the dev workflow -- those are some good incentives right there. I got a client to pay 50% monthly fees more for a win32 stack by promising (and delivering) a TDD'd site in shorter time. Everyone is winning here. I'm sure other servers beat IIS on performance, sexiness and general karma -- it doesn't matter in the face of total cost and ease of dev.
(Please note that, at no point in the above, did I say this was the only way. Don't waste your time trying to convince me [X] is better -- (a) I know I can do what I want in other environments and (b) I don't really care to be told, mainly because of (a). The OP was bringing up a point and the comments I've seen so far are typical anti-MS /.-isms based solely in the hate for Redmond (not that Microsoft is golden by any stretch of the imagination))
Linux is far easier to manage - all the necessary controls for management are just below the surface, just takes lookig for them. Windows looks easier on the surface, but an administrator has far more tools for management, and far more powerful tools in a Linux enviroment - it's just that those tools aren't obvious at first glance, because a Linux system is a sandbox waiting to be molded, whille Windows gives you one or two ways to do most things, and if those ways don't work for you, or the developer didn't think of it, then tough luck.
noexec, nosuid, selinux, iptables, PAM - all policy-based management tools with real teeth, rather than feel-good "oh, we'll just hide the icons" approaches (yes, I know, you can do real security with GPOs and ACLs, but few actually bother).
Linux is also an open book for the administrator - making it easy to understand the system to be able to build strong security policies, without as many holes as my cheese grater. I knoe that barring serious bugs in the underlying operating system, the rules I've set are solid, and will be enforced, without loopholes because X application didn't bother to check Y registry entry to find out that Z wasn't allowed.
Windows doesn't give me the same gurantees, because it, and almost every application on it are black boxes. Other than possibly filesystem ACLs themselves, there's not that many places where you can actually draw a line in the sand and know for sure that the OS won't let anything cross it. Remember also that Windows was designed as as single user operating system without any access control whatsoever, and still has many relics of that heritage even in 2014. Unix and Linux have their heritage in timesharing enviroments - places where User and Administrator always meant seperate things and where users have always had to be seperated from one another.
Don't wear out the IIS servers... http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
I prefer Classic Slashdot.