Netcraft Says IIS Gaining on Apache 666
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."
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.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:1, Insightful)
That is an interesting point. How many of them are "parked" domains and how many are active sites? ANY web server can handle 5000 inactive URLs pointing to flunky advertising sites. I would like to see those states with the domain registrars excluded.
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?
Easy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Based on my experience with MS products, GUIs make really shitty configuration interfaces. You have to click all over the place to set things up, and there is no way to look at very many of the options at a time when they are spread across multiple tabs. Fine when you are following a "run sheet", but a total nightmare when you are trying to troubleshoot something.
Have you ever actually used the IIS or Exchange (or even Outlook) configuration GUI? <shudder>
Re:Home computers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone installing IIS on their home computer is more than likely aware of Apache and didn't install it for whatever reason.
Maybe the decline in Apache is due to the leaps IIS has taken in both reliablity (4 of the top 10 hosts with the best reliablity are running W2k3), supportability, expandiblity and security. Not to mention OOTB it can do a lot more than Apache does OOTB.
I was looking at netcraft... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many legitimate hosting sites use a handful of IPs for hundreds or thousands of sites. Counting by IP isn't valid.
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Easy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a very convincing argument.
First, text editors have this really nifty feature called "search". Takes you right to the string that you request.
Second, what if I want to see/verify all settings? What if I want to make sure that Server B is configured exactly the same as Server A? Much easier to scroll through (or diff) a config file than to click on every single frigging tab and subdialog, remembering which ones I have looked at and what they were set to.
Yes, to each his own, but anyone who has done anything beyond setting up a single web server once, curses the MS GUI configuration interfaces.
Re:Actually, I think it is something else entirely (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I was looking at netcraft... (Score:2, Insightful)
It is true that godaddy switched parked domains to IIS. Netcraft has noted so in their survey. But that doesn't explain the apparently sustained growth of IIS.
And an XP box with an IIS on it will not make it on the the Netcraft stats, unless it hosts a *site*. On top of that XP does not by default install IIS.
Note also that the same trend is visible when looking at the "active sites".
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:2, Insightful)
Amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:1, Insightful)
Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:1, Insightful)
Alternately, the builders of the Titanic were not the ones that sailed full-steam into an area full of icebergs, after ignoring warnings of said icebergs in said area.
Besides - I thought we were supposed to make car analogies, not boat analogies.
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).
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?
Re:The ASP Effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:IIS dying out in Germany (Score:1, Insightful)
Easy to dismiss any and all critique or questioning as "bashing", isn't it. At least part of the question got answered:
However, what about XP? Of the MS server platforms MS Server 2003 has negligable market penetration compared to XP.
It's common enough for MS patches and upgrades and services packs to turn things on or off, change configurations or just plain break something. So it's happened before, and since most of us have to work and don't have time or interest to follow the details of MS Windows, it's logical to ask.
It's also logical to ask because the remaining MS Windows users have become so used to that kind of effect from patches, upgrades and service packs that they don't complain. In fact it gains them a few hours of overtime. The press doesn't comment either, because it happens again and again and is business as usual, and because the remaining trade magazines are so dependent on MS advertising that the editors won't let any non-praise slip through.
Easy to dismiss any and all critique or questioning as "bashing", isn't it.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I love that little barrier to entry found outside of Microsoft. It ensure some minimum level of knowledge. That way I don't have to listen to some ASP programmer tell me how he likes the "IIS operating system" over the "Apache operating system". Let's just hope it stays that way.
Re:IIS dying out in Germany (Score:1, Insightful)
Troll somewhere else. No assertion [reference.com] was made. A question was asked and you do have to admit that even though the answer appears to be "no" that it was/is a possibility.
Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IIS dying out in Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
In aviation parlance, it's "Knowing just enough to be dangerous". While Microsoft can enable trained monkeys to run the IT department, it will produce more lock-in, thus more dependency on what will be very expensive paid support if market share reaches a certain mass, and lower salaries. Win-win for the bean counters everywhere.
Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's akin to people thinking they are CEO material, just because they can make a power point presentation.
Re:taking a go-kart to Daytona? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, because you had poor engineers and a poorly implemented solution, the technology sucks? How do you rationally reach that conclusion when you admit in your own argument that the solution was poorly engineered? Shouldn't you be blaming the engineers / consultants rather than the technology used? I guarantee there are similar examples of poorly implemented solutions based around apache.
If you're going to be spouting off about how IIS is a bicycle and apache is a locomotive, perhaps you could give us examples of equally implemented solutions that compare performance. Don't cop out that they had "Microsoft consultants" either, since the majority of
I suppose at least you qualified this as your "subjective opinion"...but still
Re:At the risk of being flamed... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, when it is, the attacker will be in ring-0.
In contrast: if my web-server is rooted, the attacker is in a limited SE-linux contexts locked down to only have access appropriate for a web-server. It can't even access remote ports (like smtp, ftp, irc, ...).
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Live by the Dumb, Die by the Dumb. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IIS dying out in Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they actually compare the HTML and count anything above a 95% similarity as one site? That is what they would have to do in order to be analyzing it as you assume they are. Anyone going to that trouble would, as GP suggested, provide some modicum of an explanation as to their methods if for no other reason than to say "See how cool we were?" and score geek points.
The only reason someone does not back up statistics and such, as has been pointed out here many many times, is they are meaningless if you actually say how little work went into obtaining them.
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.
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Insightful)
If one IIS server has one thousand sites, it is still just one IIS server installation.
If one Apache server has one thousand sites, it is still just one Apache server installation.
Any other way of counting is invalid.
The problem comes when one server has several IP's. But that would corrupt the data much less than counting sites on servers with multiple sites, since a server tends to have more sites than IP's.
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:3, Insightful)
Show me a shop that goes with IIS because of this and I'll show you a shop with crappy IT managers.
If you are an IT manager worth his payment, you realize that if your admins can't handle a machine on the machine level, then the first time something breaks in a way the GUI doesn't provide a flashy wizard for you will be calling in consultants that take ten times as much per hour as your in-house staff does. If you think of that as responsible management, I think you should be fired.
Re:At the risk of being flamed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, when you serve a request, you're either running a program (in some way) to generate the content, or you're serving something already on disk, using the webserver itself.
In the first case, dynamic content, the specifics of the server are going to be lost in the noise. We benchmarked my company's webserver overhead at 3ms on a 100ms request, and that's pretty typical of web applications. Getting that down to 2ms is not going to increase overall performance much.
In the second case, that of static content, there are much better servers than Apache anyway. For the sake of argument, I'll grant that IIS is twice as fast as Apache at serving static content. But it doesn't matter! Serving static content is still much faster than serving those dynamically-generated pages. A client is likely to spend far more time waiting for dynamic page generation and actual HTTP transfers than waiting for the server to start sending a static file.
And static content is instantly clusterable as well, since there's no state. logo2.png doesn't need to hit the database, I imagine, and if you're big enough to care about static content performance, you're big enough to get more than one machine anyway.
What is boils down to is that Apache is free, Free, and flexible. IIS may have improved in the latter lately, but it's hard to imagine something that can't be accomplished with Apache's module system. You can even strip it down to being able to serve bare HTTP requests, if you'd like, but why would you ever want to?
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I know current versions of IIS don't even compare to, say IIS 4. I also know that Active Directory and all the other nice features enable you to set up a really great corporate network with some tough security.
Problem is: 99% of the windos admins and/or MCSE people don't know shit. There are exceptions. I've met some. They are a minority. Most corporate networks are run by what in other industries would equate to apprentices.
Yes, there are know-nothings in the Unix world, too. But they are weeded out faster because it's harder to cover your inabilities and in result the ratio is probaly reversed.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
but Microsoft products have a tendency to make n00bs of every kind *feel* they've mastered their tools, hence their natural preference.
Re:The ASP Effect? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've got a question for you, and everyone, really.
Do you want operating systems and development software to be forever dominated by a single corporation that charges you what they want for each, even if their stuff is a bit better? I mean, fundamentally, that's what pisses me off. Are we really going to still have a vast number of electronic devices running, and having stuff developed for, Microsoft Corporation software, in 100 years' time? With MS's stubborn maintenance of position in the computing indistry, it's starting to seem that way. I find it fucking annoying.
I've never had any trouble configuring Apache (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never had any trouble configuring Apache. But then, I'm a geek. The problem isn't so much that Apache or PHP is losing out to IIS or .NET ... the problem (as we see it) is that geeks are losing out to suits.
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.
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I have run sites where the life of the company did depend on the site being up and running 24/7 and every downtime could be measured in thousands of bucks.
Though I understand lots of shops are more lax about these things. See my original post: Crappy management. If I were the CEO, I'd judge the competence of my IT chief on whether or not he lets me play around with an important server when I visit the data center. If he does, he's more interested in politics than his machines and he can take those ambitions somewhere else.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Or you could use the COM interop to admin IIS.
Or you could use the command line tools that ship with IIS.
But dont let facts get in the way of your posting or anything.