Slashdot Log In
Netcraft Says IIS Gaining on Apache
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Aug 06, 2007 09:16 AM
from the trolls-rejoice-in-netcraft-story dept.
from the trolls-rejoice-in-netcraft-story dept.
benjymouse quotes this month's netcraft survey "In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think parked domains are considered "active servers." The Netcraft stats show that IIS is gaining ground against Apache even faster among active servers than nonactive servers (see this graph [netcraft.com]). Godaddy switching to IIS would not explain that.
Or am I misunderstanding what "active servers" are?
Parent
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with
Parent
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:5, Funny)
More than that, all /. readers know full well, that PHP is actually very good at sucking
while .net is pathetic, even at sucking.
Parent
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:5, Interesting)
Two articles:
Experiences of using PHP in Large Websites [ukuug.org]: from 2002, but the basic PHP philosophy hasn't changed since then (although some specifics have). Oversimplification and pandering to less experienced developers hurts the language as a whole.
PHP in Contrast to Perl [tnx.nl]. From the table of contents:
It's not that PHP is that bad. VB, COBOL and PL/1 were all much worse. It's that there are better languages out there that people never learn because they learned PHP as "n00bs" (you can almost detect a PHP developer by his use of that word) and are complacent with it.
Incidentally, I think it's a lot more mind-expanding to learn two programming languages than to learn one. I see single-language people all the time confusing possibility with possibility in a particular language, or confusing overall algorithms and data structures with particular idioms from their pet language. It's sad.
Parent
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's establish some objective benchmarks for general-purpose programming languages. Can we agree that it's better for a language to be consistent than not? That it's better to be expressive (as opposed to requiring verbose constructs for simple ideas)? Can we agree that separating code into separate namespaces and modules is a fundamentally good idea? Can we say that "spooky action at a distance" is generally bad? Of course, we should include the each with which a language is learned there too.
A language can't optimize for all these at once, so there's always a tradeoff. Perl trades virtually everything else for expressiveness. Java focuses on consistency. Python, a balance of consistency and expressiveness that you could call aesthetic.
PHP's focus is on being as easy as possible to pick up for the inexperienced programmer who just wants to get his personal task done without having to learn too much about the language.
Consider two animals: animal A reproduces by spawning, and easily has 10,000 offspring. Let's say 0.01% of these offspring go on to reproduce, for an average of 10 offspring per animal A. Now consider an animal B that rears 3 offspring, 90% of which survive to have offspring of their own. In the same niche, animal A will have a huge reproductive advantage over animal B, and animal A will drive B out of its niche in a few generations, ignoring other considerations.
Despite each B being better (say, more intelligent, stronger, faster, etc.), the niche A and B are competing in doesn't require the animal to be better. A is better off, since it devotes its resources to reproducing faster instead of being better individually. If that niche were more demanding, B might be better off.
Now translate that idea into programming language terms. PHP is very easy to pick up for the "n00b", giving it a huge reproductive advantage over other languages. Since PHP is so easy to pick up for mediocre programmers, the typical programmer using PHP will be mediocre. It's not that good people don't use PHP, but that these good people are vastly outnumbered.
Yet PHP is astoundingly successful. What does that tell us?
Most web programming is not hard. The niche is not demanding. PHP, the meme, is better off sacrificing being a "good" language so it can spread, and even in its weakened form, it's more than up for the task. PHP is a more fit language for web programming in an overall sense, if not an individual one.
I'm not arguing that the language designers consciously designed it that way, by the way. I'm merely arguing that that's how it happened. When I say that PHP "wants" this or that, I'm just drawing a metaphor.
Other programming niches, by the way, are more demanding. You'd be hard-pressed to find a language like PHP in, say, compiler-writing. There, the task is harder, so the language, and thus the programmers, are hardier. "Better" languages are more fit for these more demanding niches.
We don't look down on PHP because we secretly desire to be esoteric code-wizards. Instead, we look down on PHP because it's like using a rock to pound in a nail: there are objectively better ways to do what it does, and people who use PHP almost universally use it only out of ignorance.
We try to combat ignorance, but when the people you attempt to educate do nothing but resist new notions, the only response that's left is pity.
Parent
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:4, Informative)
People were paid to develop Apache. Open source != everybody worked for free.
Parent
Subsection A, Paragraph B.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Sites vs IP numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
One IP number can represent dozens of name virtual hosts. So if you count IP numbers you get stats favoring IIS, which has closer to a 1:1 ratio (or worse) of machine to web presence. If you count hostnames, you get stats favoring all other HTTP servers.
And if you limit your survey to HTTP compliance then you eliminate all IIS sites. Add in TCP/IP compliance and you eliminate anything hosted on MS Windows [neohapsis.com], accidentally, out of ignorance or otherwise not just IIS but also Lighttpd and Apache.
Parent
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Interesting)
Counting by IP address is by far, more accurate than comparing hostnames and sites. So counting by IP is MORE VALID than the method they used. Despite your ignorant little point.
If you want to count individual BOXES, then IP is as close as you are going to get without doing a survey or special fingerprinting of the data to find differences in machines. (It will still be too big, I run 122 IPs with about 350 sites on them. The ratio changes all the time due to customers coming/going and reconfigurations...)
I am going to guess, that the fact that millions of "parking" domains are run for the most part on Apache causes the popularity of that particular activity of lowlife scum to weigh heavily in the Netcraft numbers.
Parent
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Informative)
Cisco, Foundry, and several other vendors make load balancing [wikipedia.org] devices that allow you to have one public-facing IP distributed to dozens of back-end machines. If you connect to 1.2.3.4 on port 80, you can actually be connected to machine A, B, C, etc.. these machines not necessarily running the same web server software or operating system. In this case the actual public-facing IP is often called a VIP (Virtual IP) since it's not assigned anywhere except on the load balancer.
You're right, it depends what you're counting. If you're counting the number of boxes that run a particular web server, then IPs will probably be more accurate, although load balancing will skew this. If you're counting the number of customers those chose IIS vs. Apache, whether or not they are jammed onto a large hosting server with other customers? Counting by sites will be more accurate there, although skewed by domain parking.
I love you too man!
I'm guessing 121 of those sites are SSL? Name-based multihosting and load-balancers mean you normally only ever need one public-facing IP for non-SSL sites. Better yet, all your back-end boxes can be configured identically, with all of the sites on every box, so you can spread the load evenly. Even if your application needs to keep the user on a particular box during a session, the load balancer can be directed to do so.
I agree (see above about skewing).
Parent
From the person above (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the question to ask is if there's any compelling reason not to use IIS. I'm sure people will spew "because it's Microsoft and you dont want your website hacked", but that's not what I'm talking about. IIS has had some problems in the past, but these days it's pretty good.
The question is when an organization already has an investment in Windows, and local domains, management tools etc....is there any reason not to use IIS? Does apache provide anything above and beyond what IIS provides when it comes to general website hosting?
Re:From the person above (Score:4, Interesting)
That's enough of a dealbreaker for me.
Parent
Re:From the person above (Score:4, Funny)
In short, I've come to regard it as the primary sign of the coming of the antichrist.
Parent
Re:From the person above (Score:5, Insightful)
Lastly, what I find almost funny is that most LAMP devs assume because a site is hosted on IIS that MSSQL is the backend. I've worked on a lot of IIS/.Net sites and about half are MSSQL and other half are MySQL. Each has its advantages and a smart development house will decide based on what it needs its RDBMS to do - not based on some software ethics.
Parent
Re:From the person above (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:From the person above (Score:5, Informative)
1. It runs on any OS, so you are not tied down to windows. Don't read that as flamebait, it's a long-term general concern because if the next windows version is not something you want to have to buy, well that's too bad since support will end eventually. All the people running windows NT servers figured that out a few years ago.
2. Apache Modules here [apache.org].
There is quite a list.
3. Easy to mass-install, easy to backup configuration, easy to clone configuration, etc.
4. Just as easy to upgrade as IIS.
In fact the only reasons I could see you would want to use IIS is the initial configuration is not nearly as easy (which I've never understood why), or if you're a total MS shop (SQL Server and ASP) it makes sense to use IIS since they are designed to work well together.
Just as a rant, I've never met a ASP programmer that actually knew what they were doing, must less that knew any good programming practices. Mostly 2 week training from some consulting agency. gak. PHP is almost as bad, but not quite.
Parent
Actually, I think it is something else entirely... (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus the fact that you can now run many more LAMP web sites per server than was previously possible. I mean, figure it out -- how many virtual sites can a person run on a modern fully configured Apache server than they could in say, 1999 before the dot com bubble burst. CPUs cores are something like 4-5x more powerful if not more, hard disk arrays bigger and faster, and the configuration setups probably ten times better. So it takes less Apache servers to run more sites, yes?
Re:Actually, I think it is something else entirely (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Uptime (Score:5, Informative)
IIS Already Leads Where Microsoft Cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IIS Already Leads Where Microsoft Cares (Score:4, Insightful)
By hobbies I mean how many new dot coms are being created? How many people are creating new and nifty content? Some sure, but the vast majority of folks are companies that see the web as a necessity and not a money maker.
The innovative companies need flexibility, power and tunability, which is given by Apache, and the LAMP stack. The corporations that see the web as a necessity just want to put information onto the Internet. They don't care about "social networks." They just care that their catalog can be viewed. And that is the domain of Microsoft, not Apache.
I personally see these statistics as a maturation of the web, not that Apache is loosing market share.
Parent
The ASP Effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The ASP Effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
At the risk of being flamed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apache is not as modular as IIS (v7 that is). IIS7 you can literally strip it so bare, all it can do is send empty HTTP 200 responses - an absolute shell of a webserver. Not even file html/file-system support. Want disk-access? Turn on disk-access module. Want asp.net? Turn on the asp.net module. Absolutely everything (and really, everything) is a module that can be ripped out.
IIS6+ deals with HTTP requests at a kernel level. That is core functionality such as responses, caching, etc are all dealt with at ring0. Performance is unbeatable.
Oh and security? IIS6 has never been rooted, ever. Add-ons have been (asp.net for instance), but IIS6 has never been.
Oh, and it's locked down by default. And easy to administer.
In my opinion Linux is probably the better OS to host a webserver on, but IIS does spank Apache all over I'm afraid - mainly for the stated reasons above.
Re:At the risk of being flamed... (Score:4, Insightful)
MS is - and always has been - an engineering shop. They never invented anything, and they don't do good design, either. What they're good at is the same thing the chinese are good at: Copy stuff from elsewhere and manufacture more of it cheaper. They're also really good at marketing.
Parent
Don't be complacent; MS have done this before (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody thought Office could replace WordStar, but MS beavered away at it, adding new features people liked and matching existing features, and now it's a distant memory. Same for Excel. The first versions of windows were jokes, but MS kept working on them and took the desktop over. Nobody used Windows as a server at first, but MS built NT and improved it and now they run the majority of small businesses and many larger ones. They had nothing in the database server market, but they bought SQL Server from Sybase and beavered away at it, and now they run a decent percentage of websites and many businesses. They were late to "the internet" but turned things round, built a browser that was the best for a while (IE5), and a web server that is now a serious contender.
Meanwhile Linux gains at the expense of Unix, and Linux geeks sit complacently back thinking they cannot be assailed. In reality the same forces that MS brough to bear on the desktop apply here: ignorance of alternatives, familiarity, PHBs, marketing, training, and, for the most part, the ability to do a decent job. Add to that the ability to easily integrate existing desktop/small business stuff, like connecting to COM objects, SQL server,
It makes me nervous to think that Microsoft could take the server off Unix/Linux as well. I don't think it's as far off as some might think. They are learning from Linux/Unix, in that their newer stuff is taking things like "xcopy deployment" and XML for ocnfig quite seriously.
taking a go-kart to Daytona? (Score:5, Interesting)
In a very large quasi-governmental organization, we have a major application that runs on a handful of Oracle systems and serves double-digit thousands of people with acceptable performance over the last half dozen years. There is an ill-thought-out project underway (a year into development) to replace this with a steaming pile of
How big? Follow me on this one: First they modeled the
Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app. Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.
The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks
So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the
In the immortal words of Stan Lee: 'Nuff said.
The lure of a truely zero-fuss .Net (Score:5, Interesting)
PHP is neat. Very neat.
Compared to any other SSI solution that is.
...etc.
There is but one problem. The world and especially the web and it's technologies is moving along at a breathtaking pace. Apache is neat, but it's style of configuration is nearly 10 years old from back when XML was considered the hottest thing since sliced bread.
Why isn't there a zero-fuss web interface backend built into Apache that enables me to configure anything I want with 3 clicks of a mouse (with a backend deactivation option of course). Why isn't there a version of PHP with a MySQL driven persistance layer and SQL-free serialisation built right into it?
How come a little bit of marketing, screencasts and a website which, for once, doesn't look like shit, and suddenly people think Rails is the holy grail of webdeving? Rails and the hip project hype they kicked off is a very good thing, but it shouldn't stop just there.
Don't get me wrong. I'm convinced that Microsoft, in terms of available software technology, is an incarnation of evil and should be avoided at all costs unless there is a solid reason not to. 'Client wants Exchange' could be one. But we have to be realistic about this. It takes only a handfull of people at MS with 2 or more braincells, freshly assigned decision power and half a billion out of Microsofts piggybank to build an entire webstack that blows any OSS solution (Zope, Rails, Django and whatnot included) out of the water and into next wednesday, technology wise. Even the most advanced OSS webstack today has superfluos installation fuss one has to go through that should disapear ASAP. There is a lure of a truely zero-fuss
IIS,
Then again, MS bought Godaddy just to raise their level of IIS installs by a few percent, and LAMP machines are extremely Multi-Domain friendly. This Necraft study might just be reflecting this. And I have no doubt that should Apache drop to a real 30%, they'd get their shit together and start building a full integrated OSS webstack that picks up where Zope ends. And not only halfway there. I hope so anyway.
My 2 Eurocents.
HELP! My LAMP is now LLPR! (Score:5, Funny)
Help me! Seriously, I need a new technology.
I like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as much as the next want-to-be web developer out there.
Started with FAMP (FreeBSD), to LAMP, to LAPP (PostgreSQL)...
But now I'm ridiculously on LLPR! (Linux, Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, Ruby)
Can someone please develop something with a vowel?!?
Re:Google Web Server (Score:4, Informative)
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/05/01/may_
Parent
IIS dying out in Germany (Score:5, Informative)
There is also a serious discrepancy in that other stats seem to show IIS on the last moments of extinction [securityspace.com] in hi-tech zones like Germany. NetCraft report doesn't really have any explanation of the figures it presents.
What's really problematic is that over time NetCraft has become less informative. No mention has been made lately of what the changes in market share are attributed to. In years past, even a percent or two got a few lines of explanation or analysis. Did one of the service packs or 'security' upgrades install and turn on IIS for all Windows users? Or are more domain parkers and cybersquatters using IIS in the server identification string?
This downturn started last year when MS paid GoDaddy to swap out (or claim to swap out) its domain parking. GoDaddy did get the OSS community to lay off by throwing some chump change to OpenSSH and we can see the result of these last 12+ months. The money did some good, but if it's just a one-off donation, then it's questionable whether then benefit offsets the harm. Either way it's funny to see GoDaddy decision makers thinking they can buy indulgences [thehostingnews.com]. Maybe it ought to become an annual fee.
Parent
Re:IIS dying out in Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to karma hell for this but, tell me, is paying someone (if they did) better or worse than Bruce Perens faking host headers [netcraft.com] in order to boast Apache ratings? Or is that even sillier than your assertion that MS sneaked IIS back on by default? (which of course wouldn't make a big dent anyway as more Windows boxes are behind firewalls than in front, and those ones already exposed on port 80 are probably doing it on purpose).
As the Perens stunt shows netcraft may not just be relying on host headers at all as you seem to think.
Parent
China, China, China! (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200706
now, if we go by countries we see immediately who is responsible for the boat of ISS, (see website above for source)
Germany: 5% ISS, 92% Apache
US: 21% ISS, 74% Apache
Canada: 25% ISS, 70% Apache
India: 33% ISS, 63% Apache
China: 67% ISS, 28% Apache
Now, since China is adding more net users on the web faster than any other country, we see the problem. China is skewing Netcraft.
Parent
Re:IIS dying out in Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally use Apache on my servers. But I could also take my good old time configuring them because I'm not planning on making any money from them.
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:4, Insightful)
A "n00b admin" isn't going to be able to master anything in a weekend. They might figure out how to set something up & get it working but mastery is a long ways off.
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:4, Funny)
Be careful of using technology-related sarcasm on slashdot. Somebody's going to read that, mod it as 'Insightful', and mean it.
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are using Visual Studio dotNet as your development environment you are not going to find Apache works too well.
The netcraft survey is bunk because it measures a quantity that has always been irrelevant. In the past the market share of Apache was artificially inflated because most parked domains would sit on Apache boxes. Now Microsoft has identified that as an issue they are starting to get the advantage.
The quantity of interest is not who supplies the Web server but what the development platform is. As a practical matter any code of interest can run on ISS but rather less can run on Apache and less again on LAMP.
And there is no guarantee that the code engine will be visible in any case. You could easily have an IIS back end written in dotNET being served up through a squid front end.
And the rate of use says nothing as to whether the software is any damn good. There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal.
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a pretty ignorant statement. I know very little about COBOL, but Fortran is a very useful language. It is extremely well suited to numerical and scientific computation. That's a small market, to be sure, but an important one. There's a reason why the most recent standard came out in 2003 and another is in the works (tentively Fortran 2008). There's a reason why Intel sells high performance compilers for two languages: C/C++ and Fortran, which they actively update.
There is no such thing as a "best" programming language. They are tools and you should use the right tool for the job. You can accomplish a given job with essentially any tool (by necessity, any Turing complete language can do anything any other can, including implement the other language) but that doesn't mean they are all created equal. Just because you don't like Fortran doesn't mean it doesn't have uses.
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Since we've converted our systems and middleware development to C#
The simple fact is, whether you like Microsoft or not,
For our purposes, the fact that we use
Apache certainly works, but the question for us is, why use Apache? What is so compelling about Apache that would make us want to give up IIS6? We've used Apache for years and continue to do so to this day, but it isn't doing anything special for us except hosting PHP scripts (the performance of which, even with an accelerator, could be better).
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
5% are MUCH harder, and the remaining 5% you just can't do at all. Period. It's that 5% that makes IIS a non-option for me personally. For some of the sites we host, either server would work fine, but in those cases, there is no reason to pay a license fee for IIS.
One of the other benefits of having worked with both apache and IIS is that that 90% of what is normally easier in IIS really isn't if you develop internal tools to do that work for apache. In fact, a single web page with just a few fields on it runs a script that sets up DNS, apache, firewall, database, chroot jail, and optionally even an entire virtual machine, fully configured and running.
It's just "by default" those scripts are not included with Apache like they are with IIS.
Also, once you learn the Apache syntax and understand how things work, it turns out that using an editor isn't any harder than the IIS GUI. In fact, it's usually MUCH easier/faster for anything repetitive.
Parent
Re:What?! (Score:5, Informative)
Here [webtoolbag.com] are several GUI administration tools for Apache.
Parent
Re:Should be tagged with haha (Score:4, Insightful)
"What? Evidence that Linux lost marketshare in something? UNPOSSIBLE! Looks like I'll have to make something up as usual!"
Are you that insecure in the software you use that you have to see any minor percentage point change in something as either the end of Microsoft or anti-Linux FUD?
Parent
MIcrosoft Learns (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of IIS 7, they have finally decided to create a Windows webserver in the modular blueprint of Apache. The betas of IIS 7 show that performance and security are better than anything that's come before it -- not just any IIS, but any webserver. Hell, the guys at Zend are saying that Zend on IIS 7 will be the most robust way to deploy PHP! And this is all built on the evolved form of Windows 2003 server, which has been the most secure O/S ever released by MS, something that a even a n00b with one weekend of training can lock down as tight as your favorite flavor or Linux.
Rather than stand around and argue about it, y'all need to get to work on Apache 3... and get ready to play catchup to MS again. The insecure days of IIS 5 are long gone; you've got your work cut out for you.
Parent
MIcrosoft Charges Too (Score:4, Interesting)
In my particular environment (high-availability, low-cpu count) microsoft license costs are extremely high compared to the same feature set in Linux. If you move into high-availability high-cpu count the costs are astronomical.
I have a sneaking suspicion that either:
A. Microsoft is gaming the system explicitly. (ex. Netcraft adjusts their collection methods)
B. Microsoft is gaming the system implicitly. (ex. the Office back end crack pipe.)
The idea that even an idiot parking domains would **pay** for something they previously got free is implausible.
OT Comment
I suspect some of the
Parent