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Apache Now Runs On Over 5 Million Sites
According to the December Netcraft survey, Apache can now be found running on over 5 million sites. Overall, Apache's "market share" dropped about a third of a percent, with the biggest change being a 0.77% increase by Zeus mostly due to its use by UUNet.
While the success of Open Source software in the commercial arena is a valid benchmark of the strength of the Open Source software movement, please don't make the mistake of thinking that success in the ecommerce arena is the ONLY valid area of competition.
I do NOT use the web only to buy things. In fact, about 99% of my use of the web is NOT for acquisitory purposes, but for informational ones. I don't care if Microsoft owns (now or in the future) all the ecommerce mindshare, because selling things is NOT what the internet is about! My DSL connection gives me a static IP address, and a consistently accessible platform from which I can publicize my thoughts. The Linux OS gives me an environment that I can take for granted, so that I can concentrate on the message, not the medium. The Apache web server gives me the means to say whatever I want to say, in exactly the way that I want.
The success or failure of Open Source software has NOTHING to do with the success or failure of commercial companies. It has everything to do with your ability to use that software in the way you want, to say what you want. Even if every ecommerce site on the web were running Microsoft's latest version of IIS, the Apache web server would still be a resounding success, because it would still permit me, Joe Average American, to publish my opinion, to use the Internet to communicate to anyone who will listen.
those "piss-ant" sites, those "Here is a Picture of My Cat" web sites, are much more important than you might think. Boring or unimaginative though they may be (I'm a firm believer in the theory that 90% of everything is crap), those piss-ant sites are the mundane embodiment of the real potential of the internet - the ability of the average person to express an opinion, in a non-instrusive way. If MS's products let you buy things, but Apache lets you say what's on your mind, then Apache is a winner. If the Apache web server, in conjunction with the Linux OS, lets you say whatever you want, no matter who owns what percentage of the market... well, there's simply nothing to complain about.
It doesn't matter what you own,
it matters what you do with what you own
- Mike McCafferty
So, if you took the time to notice the small blurb below the fancy graphic:
So to be included you merely have to test a site you are curious about at some point.
What this says to me is that I can put in any number of IP addresses that are bound to a hosting server. If they are doing checks on this alone they would get different points on the graph. However, the problem with that is that a massive virtual hosting operation could really skew the number.
Netcraft even realizes this and states it clearly on the Mechanics page.
Now, the same is true of IIS4 which just makes me think that the number isn't completely representative and that the sample has potential for being flawed.
There are several caveats when looking at compiled data like this in a simplified graphic.
So, before you shoot off at the mouth to your MIS director make sure you can qualify the data you present. Make no mistake that MS has some idea of how many NT4 installs took place with IIS4 counting as running as a service whether or not the people running it know about it. There are many many places with the MS equivilent of the Apache successful install home page. *grin*
Just remember that joe business owners internal intranet IIS4 box with some canned application isn't going to show up on this kind of study. And internal MIS projects that go bump in the night won't either. How many users would really notice if you mapped let .asp be a known extension for perl cgi's? *grin*
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/
http://fudge.org
We've all seen the stats on the number of hosts running PHP on top of Apache, since it's often mentioned in the server header on Apache.
What I'm more interested in is a thorough breakdown of how many sites are running ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion, CGI, FastCGI, JSP/servlet engines and Java app servers.
This can be hairy-to-impossible to measure; all you can really go on are substrings in URIs, and there's no way to tell if something called "foo.pl" is a Perl CGI or a mod_perl module.
What makes this a point of interest is that what HTTP server you're running is an ever smaller piece of the story these days. After all, you can run PHP on IIS. You can run ASPs on Apache under Unix--even VBScript ones, if you buy Chilisoft's module. Servlets, JSPs and high-end application servers are cross-platform: you can most servlets, or something like StoryServer, WebLogic or Dynamo on IIS, Apache or a Netscape server on any of several operating systems without changing a line of your code.
Heck, all those ".cfm" URLs are pretty ambiguous these days. ColdFusion, though closely associated with NT environments, has run on Solaris for ages, the core engine is also now available as a platform-independent servlet, and starting with a beta of 4.5, the flagship product is now also on Linux.
The important NT "wins" are the sites running ASP on IIS, with the logic tier built as COM objects hosted on MTS. And that's how many larger IIS sites are built these days. And unless, like Barnes and Noble, you are getting direct development assistance from Microsoft, this combination should strike a sensible technologist as an alarming degree of lock-in to a single vendor.
Compare this to the freedom that using open technologies, whether PHP and mod_perl, or servlets and JSP, or even large-scale Java app servers gives you. Now that the major app server vendors have coalesced around the J2EE spec, you can switch from one big, scary app server to another, change operating systems and development tools, change databases, and change HTTP servers and still keep the bulk of your code intact. And most of what you're running will also run on a free, dinky little servlet engine or one of the forthccoming open-source EJB app servers chugging down the pike.
Doing things with ASP and don't like the latest direction MS Visual Studio is taking? Don't like the wholesale changes to the VB object model every 3 years? Want to try a different OS because you just can't get decent uptime and clustering working well enough under NT or Win2000? Too bad.