Apache Webserver Surpasses 50 Million Website Mark

chris81 writes "For the first time ever, the Apache Web Server is powering more than 50 million websites, according to Netcraft's Web Server Survey for October. Although relative share fell by 0.67 percent, the total number of sites powered by Apache grew to over 52 million. Microsoft's IIS finished second with more than 15 million sites served."

Re:Apache License?

[QuantumG]

      1. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and

      2. You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and

      3. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and

      4. If the Work includes a "NOTICE" text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.


The last clause there is what makes it incompatible with the GPL and what made the OpenBSD folks fork it (they folked before the license change to include this clause). In answer to your question, yes, indeed anyone is free to extend and distribute binary forms of the software without having to hand over source code for their extensions (or even for the code they didn't write).

But here's a question for you. If you're required to give "any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License", does that mean that the extended work has to be under this license? Or does it just mean you have to give the license to them, even though it isn't applicable. What stupid wording. Presumably it means you can't change the license on the software.. but you can apply any license you want on your extensions.. which means you can prohibit the software from being distributed, even though "this license" says you are free to distribute it.

What will LAMP's success mean to M$?

[linumax]

Well, actually they have their own plans [com.com].
and part of the plan is giving some for free! See SQL Server 2005 Express Edition's Pricing Policy [microsoft.com] and the same for Visual Studio Express Edition which will be free.
I don't do much open-source programming but I'd like to thank all those guys who do, cuz if it was not for their efforts, M$ would have never given something for free (at least as in beer!!)
Anyway, the point is that some small businesses might be attracted to M$'s side by giving these development tools for free and this might have an effect on Apache and as a whole LAMP's market share.

Re:...and

[diegocgteleline.es]

That's what the "active sites" means I think - and that would make 23 millions of real apache servers

http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200007.html#activ e [netcraft.com]

Re:What will LAMP's success mean to M$?

[nogginthenog]

4 GB maximum database size

Looks a bit like MS SQL Desktop Engine. That's been around for a while - originally bundled with Visual Studio, some Office versions and other MS stuff, but downloadable recently-ish from MS for free.

Re:Odd lines in chart

[odie_q]

Their selling point is integration. I have a client who design, sell and admin content management systems, and they are a pure MS shop. Their products rely heavily on the integration between IIS, Exchange, .Net and Active Directory. From what I have seen they would have a lot less hassle with a system of separate components that actually work and fit with their product instead of shoehorning their stuff into the MS conventions, but they are convinced that the superior integration of Microsoft's offerings give them a significant advantage.

On the other hand, they have pretty good knowledge about how to program for Microsoft products, and no knowledge whatsoever about any competing products, so in their case they are obviously better off using the stuff they know.

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP has nothing to do with Apache. You can run it also inside IIS.

Re:...and

[Anonymous Coward]

Not 23 million actual servers, just 23 million different sites. Probably hosted on just a few hundred thousand physical servers. Netcraft "active sites" calculation is based on an estimate from contacting each server IP address a few times using a selection of the registered names and then comparing them. e.g. if you host 4000 domains which all say "We own this domain $domain, why not offer us money for it?" Netcraft will notice that 4000 names lead to that IP address, connect say 14 times, get a very similar response each time and conclude that there is only one active site.

23 million servers would represent almost 1% of all unicast IPv4 addresses (and AFAIK Netcraft don't look for IPv6-only servers)

Re:Three considerations

[rjw57]

Follow the links in TFA. They you'll get to http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200007.html [netcraft.com] which says
"The Netcraft Web Server Survey is a survey of Web Server software usage on Internet connected computers. We collect and collate as many hostnames providing an http service as we can find, and systematically poll each one with an HTTP request for the server name."

Domain registrars

[miller60]

Larien is correct. The changes indicate infrastructure shifts at domain registrars, specifically Network Solutions and Namezero (as alluded to in this Netcraft post [netcraft.com] from 2003 and this one [netcraft.com] from 2001. Both briefly shifted from Solaris to Windows, and then back again.

Re:Micosoft salesrep

[Anonymous Coward]

IIS is also arguably faster, as it's running on a single architecture, on an OS designed by the same developer.

IIS is not arguably faster than Apache httpd, it is faster. What is arguable is the wisdom of running a server at ring0 (kernel address space). Apache was not designed for raw speed, it was designed to be full-featured, stable and correct. If you want to see IIS trounced by a kernel based httpd, take a look at TUX [redhat.com] and this (typically flawed) benchmark [litespeedtech.com]. The only good thing I have to say about IIS is that version 6 appears to have undergone a security audit and is no longer being rooted by simple HTTP GET requests (a genuine Microsoft innovation) like previous versions.

Re:Why use IIS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I'm not trying to be a troll. I just want to understand the reasons that make someone choose IIS over Apache, since (AFAIK) the later is more secure, more capable, and performs better under heavy load.

Can anyone point me some?

Sure! Microsoft can:

For reasons, see these case studies:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/iis/eva luation/casestudies/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
- better uptime
- better TCO
- easier to maintain
- more secure
- improved leveragement of potential monetizement of business platform migration plan total cost of... (bribes)

To migrate from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windo ws2000serv/technologies/iis/deploy/rollout/lapa2ii s.mspx [microsoft.com]

There!

Apache share *INCREASED*

[krygny]

"Although relative share fell by 0.67 percent, the total number of sites powered by Apache grew to over 52 million."

From September to October, Apache's share went from 69.15% to 69.89% (+0.74%).

Re:Why is apache so popular?

[SumDog]

Because most of the tools we use for web development work and are actively maintained on Apache. mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ruby, etc. Sure you can use these via CGI with any web server, but the in process execution makes them more convenient to use.

Apache has turned into a de-facto standard. People can expect security updates for it, and the large user base insures its longevity. With any major piece of software, there are always better alternatives. But still, people use sendmail, even though we have postfix and qmail. People use bind...

Apache works, is solid, scalable and is supported by many languages and many people. That's why most people use it.

Re:Why use IIS?

[ajs318]

ASP requires only minimal effort? HAH!

PHP requires just as little effort if you turn register_globals back on.

It's only insecure if you let it be insecure. Blindly doing an iteration such as

foreach ($_POST as $i => $_) { ${$i} = $_; };
foreach ($_GET as $i => $_) { ${$i} = $_; };

is really no more secure than having register_globals turned on in the first place. The real insecurity came from the order in which the variable sources were processed; by default a query string in a GET request would clobber a session variable. Doing GET first, then POST, then cookies and finally sessions fixes it {although you can't do some nifty tricks which are useful for testing}. So my preference is

variables_order = "EGPCS"
register_globals = On

which gives me the best of both worlds; I'm not cluttering up my code reading form variables out of globals, but neither is it possible to override session variables with a query string.

Beside which, there is nothing quite so insecure as the fact that any PHP script running on the same server can fopen() any file in any other user's webspace -- and some cheap hosting companies really are stupid enough to use the same login and password for Linux login and MySQL database. And on Mandrake {not that anyone uses that in a serious hosting environment}, it was the default for any user to be able to use `poweroff` at the command line. I wonder if that included, or still includes, the Apache daemon's user? :)

Re:what operating systems are popular with Apache?

[Ian.Waring]

Some of the OS numbers used to get bent out of shape by people front ending Windows machines with Linux based cache or content distribution networks (Akamai being a notable one). Which is why MS used to show up as running Linux for www.microsoft.com. The methodology has probably improved since.

Ian W.

Re:Micosoft salesrep

[McGiraf]

# apachectl configtest

by the way IIS has a ton of settings that cannot be changed by the GUI, you have to and regstry key for them.