Netcraft: Microsoft Closing In On Apache Web Server Lead 102
angry tapir sends this IDG report:
"After almost two decades of trailing the market leader, Microsoft's Web server software is coming close to rivaling the dominance of the Apache Web server, according to the latest Netcraft survey of Internet infrastructure. May saw an additional 9 million sites using Microsoft Web server software, increasing the company's share of the Web by 0.37 percent. In the same period, Apache's market share fell by 0.18 percent, despite gaining an additional 4.3 million sites. Microsoft is now just 4.1 percentage points behind Apache, which, as the most popular Web server software on the Internet, now powers about 37.6 percent of all sites."
What's really happening (Score:4, Informative)
Re:squatting (Score:5, Informative)
This happens so often. Some big web hosting firm (GoDaddy or whoever) switches from Linux to Microsoft, or vice versa. That causes millions of parked domains to switch OS. And, to be fair, Netcraft often points this out in the comments.
With web sites that are actually active - as noted by a previous commenter - Apache's lead is huge. It always has been. And, in truth, the biggest "danger" to Apache is probably Nginx (another free, usually Linux-based web server) rather than IIS.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:squatting (Score:5, Informative)
Most of them. The headline is very misleading. The next sentence in TFA is:
"Apache's position is much stronger when considering only Active Sites — it retains an absolute majority of 52.3%, and second place is held by nginx (14.4%), rather than Microsoft (11.3%). By excluding much of the automatically-generated content present on the internet, the Active Sites metric better reflects web server market share amongst human-maintained web sites."
In other words, most of IIS's "catchup" is really just parked domains and the like. In reality, I bet Apache is nearer 60% because most of the "nginx sites" will be reverse proxies in front of an Apache server. We have four domains that are hosted by Apache for example, but Netcraft thinks they are nginx because of the reverse proxy.
Re:squatting (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest threat to Apache is Apache. HTTPD 2.4 removed support for a number of operating systems and is tuned only for Linux. They've gone to the dark side and it's going to hurt them.
Combine that with nginx, varnish and lighttpd and there are several real choices in the *NIX world. There is no need to go Apache anymore. This will make them look bad for some time to come as people try out alternatives. I'm evaluating switching to nginx now. The configuration is much different, but in the end it should make things much better.
What are the "number of OS's"? It clearly supports windows versions > windows 2000 (which my guess is better than the most recent release of IIS). I feel pretty sure the BSD guys would find a way to get supported. So what else, Solaris? Whoops, no, looks like people are doing that somewhere. BeOS? Android? If Apache looses ground, its primarily its reputation for memory and performance related issues.
Re:Parked domains... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apache is dying... (Score:5, Informative)
Web server developers: Market share of active sites = looks like MS is on a slight downward trend.
Web server developers: Market share of the top million busiest sites = looks like MS is on a slight downward trend.
And in both of those graphs, Apache is far and away holding the biggest share, *and* Nginx is ahead of MS. But let's face it, we all knew that anyway.