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."
Google Web Server (Score:1, Interesting)
GoDaddy and the like? (Score:5, Interesting)
My server (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
Not a surprise (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
The configuration/managment tools suck. In fact, they're mostly non-existent. To get the most out of Apache, you are going to be editing configuration files by hand.
Now, don't get me wrong, Apache is great, and dealing with the configuration issues is not THAT difficult, and the benefits are worth the effort. But MAN. IIS is *so* much easier to deal with when it comes to 99% of the configuration duties that you need to do on a web server. The defaults are sane, almost everything just takes a few clicks to set up.
Now, if you want to AUTOMATE configuration of your webserver, obviously IIS royally sucks compared to Apache. But for clarity and simplicity of configuration, IIS wins by a mile. It's not even close.
Re:From the person above (Score:3, Interesting)
Home computers. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:From the person above (Score:4, Interesting)
That's enough of a dealbreaker for me.
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?
IIS Already Leads Where Microsoft Cares (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What?! (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously, some FOSS projects need to get more serious about the front ends. Editing config files by hand is so 1990's. Maybe that's why FOSS doesn't get taken as seriously as it should, because it looks like it harps back to DOS days.
The ASP Effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Lower Quality Admins (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I've worked with IIS and Apache. I find IIS a real pain to administer, and often difficult to diagnose problems. Apache is a bit more difficult to get up and running, but having easily accessible configs makes it a lot easier to maintain.
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.
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.
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.
Re:The ASP Effect? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that is a surprise! Why not drop the apples to oranges comparison and compare c# to Java?
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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
Apache on Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
People install IIS so they can use Microsoft's varied and highly efficient enterprise application development tools. The tools are superior for business needs, and so with them come the operating system and web server.
I continue to prefer Apache on FreeBSD (not Linux) as my primary platform if I want stuff to work right from the beginning, but on Windows 2003 or greater or Linux from the same vintage, practical performance (real-world factors that users and business cohorts will notice) is very, very close.
The operating system has grown up and so has the web server. The vast gulfs in performance are no longer so vast. I'm not sure how I feel about this either. Part of me will forever be nostalgic for the computer gang warfare days of the 1980s, when Apple II users snubbed PC owners, Commodore 64/128 users were lawbreaking maniacs, the weird kids used Ataris to make techno and the Amiga people were as annoying as the Macintosh people are today.
Interestingly, from the days of the 286 onward, finding home UNIXen was not as difficult as one might think. First AT&T, then Minix, then a number of ports of Berkeley and AT&T UNIXes came down the path. True, it required top-notch hardware, but that was an artifact of the time when most machines were 1-8 MHz boxes.
Ah, nostalgia!
Re:GoDaddy and the like? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Microsoft Gaming Netcraft (Score:3, Interesting)
This page is pretty strange. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/requested.htm
Conjecture aside, what's happening is all kinds of GPL(ish) projects are growing and the stats are being positioned as a loss for Apache. This is very similar to how NPD intellect royally screws Apple in favor of Microsoft by aggregating all PC's with Microsoft's OS against Apple. Disaggregate the numbers by vendor and you find Apple does extremely well in consumer segments.
Well that explains a lot (Score:3, Interesting)
So as we see this increase in Windows servers on the net, I fear we'll see an increase in incidents of machines compromised for bot membership and on and on.
I'm *NOT* saying that Linux is more secure in this regard. As mentioned above, some compromised boxes are, in fact, LAMP boxes. I'm saying that Windows boxes are an easier target and are targeted more often and compromised successfully quite often with automated measures since they are all typically configured the same ways with the same directory structures, software patches and updates etc. (With the variety of Linux distros out there, there is far less incident of homogeny in system configuration which at the very least slows down automated procedures for compromises and take-overs.)
In any case, I think there's a distinction to be noted in that more frequently targeted doesn't mean less secure. (I hope G.W.Bush isn't reading this...) But given that Linux and Windows security is equal (indulge me), what does it mean when Windows is targeted more often?
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? This gives you a setup that works right off the bat, and is reasonably secure. IIS has *nothing* on Apache. Configuring a more flexible site does take a bit of elbow grease, but I wouldn't say that it's any more than IIS.
Upgrades are also a cinch, and don't require a reboot.
Re:Close your eyes and plug your ears. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've successfully fixed and restarted a broken Apache configuration on a Palm III going online via mobile phone and IR link (I was on the train, no other option for at least half an hour).
Try that with IIS. And no, that wasn't a minor thing, the company was losing an estimated 500 for every minute the server was down.
There are many good reasons why plain-text configuration files are still a good idea in 2007. One of them is that if you want a flashy GUI go and write one. You can. It's an open, well-documented, easy-to-implement format.
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish it wasn't true. It's nasty, horrible, ugly to write and maintain. But it is still true, it's damn fast. I write high performance EM simulators in C++. They're quite fast. On a really good day they'll reach the speed of the equivalent Fortran code. At best. I prefer C++ because I spend at least as much time messing with code as running it. The astrophysics guys here almost all write in Fortran. The protein folders too. If you're trying to simulate the whole universe, every bit of speed makes a difference and Fortran still has the edge. Sigh. Maybe I'll be forced back into writing it some day.
moderators! moderators! moderators! (Score:2, Interesting)
To the rest of you, please, meta moderate frequently, and be sure to flag these kinds of things as "Unfair". It's the only hope to save Slashdot. God knows the keepers of the system won't fix the algorithms that allow people to be bounced out of the moderation system by a couple jackass moderators flipping Troll mods at all the people they don't like.
Re:moderators! moderators! moderators! (Score:3, Interesting)
With respect to the particular post above us, Twitter is being punished for having an opinion that differs from the moderator, rather than being punished for being consistently insipid. The Twitter post in question is weak sauce, but it isn't off-topic and it's not even really much different from the opinions held by quite a few people posting round here. Hell, it really isn't even inflammatory enough to warrant the briefest consideration as a Troll mod if it has been posted by some random newbee, for example, or by someone who posted on a wider variety of topics and had more "street cred".
Maybe other Twitter posts are Trolls, but this one seems unfairly punished by, what, possibly a paid pro-Microsoft contingent? Abuse of the Troll and Flamebait mods to squelch opinions that the moderators don't like appears to me to be entirely too common of late. Personally, I'd rather never see another post by that twit, Twitter, they are a waste of electrons, but Troll is an abuse in this case.