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."

Actually...

[DavidHOzAu]

It's because of php's increasing popularity, as this page [php.net] shows.

Re:...and

[KiloByte]

I wonder how they count it when you have different names for a single site:

<VirtualHost *>
                ServerName urukpr0n.angband.pl
                ServerAlias urukporn.angband.pl urukp0rn.angband.pl urukpron.angband.pl
[...]
(No, this site [angband.pl] isn't what you think.)

This is especially important if you count the fact that in a lot of cases www.$SITE is a CNAME for $SITE.

Odd lines in chart

[inkswamp]

The chart marked "Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - October 2005" is interesting. I'm not entirely sure I understand what it means, but July 2001 and June 2004 show an almost mirror image in terms of the blue and red lines (Apache and MS.) When one goes up, the other goes down and vice-versa. Strange. I wonder what exactly was happening during that time period to cause that.

Re:Err....

[Skiron]

12,000,000 of them are within microsoft.com domain (spoofed Apache httpd)...

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's quite funny that PHP developers are still recommending [php.net] not to use apache with a threaded MPM (because of 3rd party libs not php I know). Dual core CPUs are there, the apache + php duo should be able to get top-performance from your systems to keep both on the top...

Three considerations

[VincenzoRomano]

#1. Sites vs servers.
Netcraft states they count the sites while they don't mention whether they count 2nd level domains (foo.com), 3rd level domains (www.foo.com, support.foo.com) or what else. They just say they "received responses from 74,409,971 sites" while not defining what a site actually is.

#2. Growth.
There has been a growth of about 3.73% in the number of (so called) web sites. There must be some hidden winner(s). That is, there must be some group of web servers that is getting the great part of the growth all at once! Netcraft is failing to mention who they are!

#3. Webserver (or website) identification.
It's all but trivial to identify web servers. Are they using some special tool like amap [thc.org] and nmap [insecure.org] or just looking at the server response content? How accurate this identification can be?

what operating systems are popular with Apache?

[SgtChaireBourne]

I would be interested to see what OSes those sites are running on

Netcraft used to show a summary with that information. I'm not sure why they stopped showing it, since they do still collect it and show it for individual site queries. I suppose if enough people ask them to reinstate it, they might actually reply to one of the messages and explain the rationale. More likely than not it probably made it evident that one of their major advertisers **cough**MS**cough was losing market share to both other http servers and other platforms.

Along the same lines, I saw a recent IDC report that showed (if one looked at the data oneself) that MS was continuing to lose market share in the server room, at least percentage wise. My guess is that they took most of Novell's share around 2000 when they ran the smear campaign against Netware and then have been slowly hemorrhaging marketshare since then.

Re:Odd lines in chart

[guruevi]

Well. That is because of the contracts running with Microsoft. We have a contract (as hostingprovider) that x-% of the servers has to be Windows based so we recompiled Apache to show up as IIS and the next month Netcraft confirmed it, we moved 15000 sites (URL-forwarding) to IIS.

Great news, but keep in mind ...

[oztiks]

This is really good news for the OS community, it shows a community product being chosen over a commerical application in the industry.

But keep in mind just because the server is not IIS and is Apache doesnt mean they arent running Windows Apache, I find lots of Windows admins leaning to Apache even when they have IIS readily available.

Re:Actually...

[Adhemar]

I have the feeling that the reason why Java-based web programming never really took off, and PHP is being widely used so widely, lies in the fact that PHP is freely shipped with the most popular web server.

So, the popularity of PHP (compared to Java) is more due to the popularity of Apache than the other way around.

Re:Odd lines in chart

[RoLi]

I'm not sure how IIS survives in the market place

They survive because of customer lock-in (aka "Integration" in salesspeak), "standardization" (with desktop systems) and the delusion (which is interestingly put forward by both pro- and anti Microsoft people) that "sooner or later" Microsoft will dominate every market and so it's better to bet on the winner.

However, with years of IIS being pretty stagnant or slowly losing marketshare, this delusion cannot be sustained forever, more and more people realize that OSS is not just a fad and is here to stay.

Also with each round of forced upgrades on the IIS-side, some jump ship.

It will probably will take a decade or two, but then IIS-fans will find themselves in the very situation they wanted to avoid: Being a tiny minority, fighting with bad 3rd party support and being frowned upon.

In some countries it already happened: In Germany, IIS runs only 5.56% [securityspace.com] of domains (down from over 20% 5 years ago) - cheap German webhosters don't offer Windows anymore at all, some webhosters charge extra for Windows and only few charge the same (however those are usually the most expensive webhosters anyway)

Re:Micosoft salesrep

[jellomizer]

Well there are the MS Fans out there who believe Microsoft's propaganda, and/or believe that Microsoft is the only serious player out there.

Secondly there are a lot of companies that are strictly a Microsoft shop, and the cost of moving is to high and the staff is use to windows so they stick with windows solutions they already bought.

Third they have a group of .NET developers and it is easy to for them to make a Web App on IIS vs. Getting Mono on Apache working, and working threw any of the glitches.

IIS is arguably easier to use then apache because you don't need to go threw and end a text file and add commands that may not be part of the default configuration.

Fear from ignorance, they are afraid if they don't use IIS then they will not be able to support the IE users, heck whenever they look at a pro-linux site who uses advanced CSS it rarely renders properly for them.

They already have Windows [NT, 2000, 2003] servers and they have IIS on them so they will use it, because they already paid for it.

It has been a long time since I heard of a major security flaws in IIS being affected and much longer for Apache. But you are expecting all the consumers to be logical, that is just crazy.

Re:what operating systems are popular with Apache?

[rolfc]

Actually they still show the os.

look at http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html [netcraft.com]

to see ths longest running servers and their os

22 days old?

[Laaserboy]

From TFA:
Posted by wss at October 4, 2005 08:40 AM

Which means that the news is 22 days old. Given that this is a monthly survey, the slashpost seems a tad bit behind the times.

One of us should write a bot that posts a story 21 days after the fact and see if we can beat the masses that happen upon Netcraft and re-print old news.

Domain Registrar

[drasfr]

Yup. I can confirm this. I used to work at a major domain registrar, using Linux/Apache and Microsoft visited us and asked for us to migrate our servers to Window/IIS for the sole purpose of increasing the netcraft numbers... We were doing URL forwarding. By the way, the conversion was VERY painful... even though they engineers came on site to work on the code for this.