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Stats Microsoft The Internet Apache IT

Will Microsoft IIS Overtake Apache? 303

First time accepted submitter jcdr writes "February's 2014 Web Server Survey by Netcraft shows a massive increase [in the share of] Microsoft's web server since 2013. Microsoft's market share is now only 5.4 percentage points lower than Apache's, which is the closest it has ever been. If recent trends continue, Microsoft could overtake Apache within the next few months, ending Apache's 17+ year reign as the most common web server."
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Will Microsoft IIS Overtake Apache?

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:10PM (#46151919)

    Apache is turning into one of the dinosaurs of the information age, being overtaken by the likes of Nginx and Lighttpd left and right but refusing to die already. IIS also is hardly the crippled pile of steaming crap which it used to be.

  • Netcraft says, "Microsoft gained a staggering 48 million sites this month, increasing its total by 19% â" most of this growth is attributable to new sites hosted by Nobis Technology Group." I have no idea WFT Nobis Technology Group is, but that suggests that what is essentially one large installation swings Netcraft's idea of "the most common web server."

    And that's a broken way of counting. If ten servers using Server A serve ten sites each, and one server with Server B serves 1,000 sites,Server A is still the most common web server, with ten times the installation base of Server B.

  • Re:Probably (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asmkm22 ( 1902712 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:14PM (#46151987)

    Sounds more like you just hate the industry you work in. It's probably best that you're leaving.

  • by daboochmeister ( 914039 ) <daboochmeisterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:18PM (#46152067)
    Parked domains are a pretty poor measure.
  • From TFA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by furbyhater ( 969847 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:24PM (#46152173)
    Since I've unexpectedly RTFA, just a heads up, the headline is even more biased than usual. On the total number of active websites, there are still about 10x as many apache websites than IIS. Same picture for the top million busiest sites. There's almost no yearly change, and the server gaining the most marketshare is NGINX.

    I'm starting to believe the hearsay: Slashdot has really been totally overrun by astroturfers (in this case paid by Microsoft). Maybe dice sells a number of "promotional posts" on a biased article to various companies, one of them being Microsoft?
  • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:26PM (#46152217)

    This kind of thing happens on a regular basis and is usually due to Microsoft making backroom deals with operators of parked domains, probably not paying in cash but in Windows license discounts for servers or hosting. Borderline illegal and classic Microsoft - don't ever be fooled into thinking that Microsoft has gotten itself a corporate personality transplant. The active sites graph tells the real story: Microsoft continues to languish. It is beyond me why Microsoft is so fixated on manipulating Netcraft stats.

  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:27PM (#46152243)

    constantly in need of restart and quickest to get owned by crackers

    it's rubbish, bad enough to have to fight with it for internal use but only an idiot would expose that to internet. yes, had to deal with IIS for over a decade

  • Re:Probably (Score:5, Insightful)

    by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:28PM (#46152273)

    Banks, they're extremely conservative and NDS's ability to replicate a sub-portion of the directory to each branch location helps keep bandwidth usage down, which can be important if you have hundreds or thousands of locations in podunk towns. I can also see using it if you're a anti-MS shop as it's the best directory server other than AD.

  • Re:Probably (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dave562 ( 969951 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:32PM (#46152331) Journal

    Novell totally blew it. It was a sad day as I watched NT 4.0 servers creep into our environment. Novell had LDAP based NDS long before Microsoft cobbled together AD. It was a much better solution and they brought it to market way ahead of the competition.

  • by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @02:43PM (#46152555) Homepage Journal

    Considering that the grow was caused because some big parked domains (with static pages) moved to IIS, i'd say that by a very wide margin, the main use of IIS is to serve domains with just one static page.

    Regarding the "better in almost every way", is almost as funny as the article title.

  • This and more (Score:5, Insightful)

    by s.petry ( 762400 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @03:09PM (#46152943)

    The "active" sites shows no such growth trend, in fact it shows IIS declining. NginX is the only web server showing growth, and even this is misleading. Most of our use for NginX is does not make Apache go away. We use NginX as a front end reverse proxy that talks to Apache back ends. NginX is good at a few things, but nowhere near as robust as Apache.

    This is just another case of pulling only the statistics you want to color a lie.

  • by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @03:09PM (#46152945) Homepage Journal

    If 10,000 Web sites are served from one server using Apache, and 100 Web sites are served from 100 servers using IIS, it would be reasonable to interpret that Apache is the more common choice for serving Web sites. It would be reasonable--not necessarily accurate, but in a vacuum decision there is a great chance of validity--to assume that Apache is the better choice for hosting Web sites in most cases, as it has been selected for more often. It would be very reasonable to assume that Apache is, in most cases, at least adequate--a satisfiser would find this palatable--while making no assumptions on whether it is more or less optimal than IIS.

    It's silly to assume that the number of servers has any real meaning, unless it can reflect resource use--at our resolution we can't even do that (are these 100 IIS servers run from Raspberry Pi, or 100 IIS servers run from ginormous Dell R620s? How much load?). Even then, that doesn't reflect all the other decisions put into it. On the other hand, there are very real questions like "Does my ASP.NET site run better on Apache?" and the answer is no; or like, "Does my Python/cherrypi site run better through WSGI/Apache or WSGI/IIS?" and the answer is no again.

    The raw number of Web sites run on Apache reflects a lot more than the number of discrete servers. But then you have questions like: are these Perl/PHP/Python, .NET, etc.? Essentially: are they Apache/IIS sites because of Apache/IIS, or because of the system that provides facilities for the site best also providing Apache/IIS support best?

  • Re: why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sez Zero ( 586611 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @03:09PM (#46152947) Journal

    The evidence of that is the "all sites" graph which shows IIS's share increasing vs. the "active sites" graph which shows IIS's share plummeting.

    I think the most interesting graph is the last: 1 million busiest sites. The downtick of Apache looks a lot like the opposite of the uptick for nginx. For busy sites, it seems nginx is separating from Google and IIS, but at the expense of Apache.

  • by colinrichardday ( 768814 ) <colin.day.6@hotmail.com> on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @03:12PM (#46152983)

    Is IIS easier than Apache to configure in Linux?

  • Re: why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @04:38PM (#46154211)

    "I don't know if Microsoft paid them, but GoDaddy did move all of their parked sites to IIS by default instead of Apache, which caused a major percentage change for Microsoft."

    And why not, especially if Microsoft is paying them to do it? Those parked sites only represent a miniscule fraction of bandwidth, but as you say, make a big percentage difference in perceived market share.

    Smooth move, Microsoft. You bring "lying with statistics" to a whole new level.

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