Submitted by “In the February 2007 survey we received responses from 108810358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache’s market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002. Microsoft-IIS gain 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month’s survey, Microsoft’s share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache’s advantage to 27.7%.”
it must be sweet for microsnot to gain all those domain parking sites
how mighty they are for managing the great workloads on those sites.
all hail our hero!
In 2001-2002 Microsoft also tried hard to make companies use IIS, and it even closed the gap with Apache more than now. But in the end things went back to their natural state.
With the growth of internet in Asia I don’t think Microsoft can keep up for too long. They’re going to have a hard time trying to convince companies in China or India to buy their software instead of using Linux/BSD.
Indeed they will; that’s why they will pirate windows.
Well, we’re talking about servers here, not PC’s.
I don’t think any hosting company (or any other that needs servers) is going to run pirate copies of Windows Server 2003 instead of running Linux/BSD.
It might be true that Chinese like pirate copies of anything, but I don’t think they’re stupid.
Incorrect; back in 2001/2002 there weren’t the array of different Windows 2003; there was only three flavours and considerable more expensive than Linux.
Fastfoward today and you can pick up a very cheap copy of Windows which ‘Webserver Edition’ so if all you need it for is just that, you don’t have to indulge into purchasing more features than you actually need, thus bringing down the over all price.
Its going to be a difficult road for Microosft though; IIS has taken a hammering after the various worms that slid their way through IIS 5, but IIS 6 and above have inproved dramatically and when IIS 7 comes on stream it’ll be a leap above that – the difficulty that Microsoft will have is convincing those in the decision making position that Microsoft have fixed their product to a degree that companies can feel safe deploying it in a large setting.
Do you remember when MS paid^H^H^H^Hhelped GoDaddy to migrate some million of its hosted websites from Apache/linux to IIS/windows ?
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/mar06/03-21GoDaddyPR….
MS probably is paying^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvincing more “partners” to migrate from Apache/linux/*BSDs to Windows/IIS.
Edited 2007-02-03 20:07
Well, there is two way to see this survey:
The first Live in your world
Like you, just saying that Microsoft is paying everybody to use their software. So you won’t change anything as you refuse to see what happens here. We will see the result of this mentality in a few years, when IIS will be at 50% or more.
The second Put yourself into question
Face that the Microsoft solutions are more and more stable/efficient and can do the job just like the other OSes without much pain.
By choosing this way you will try to make Unix software better, put Unix in the next step instead of finding some excuses each new web server survey pointing that Apache web servers are droping.
Microsoft chose the second way until windows XP, when they realize that Apple (with the ipod and now Mac OS X – seeing the interview of Gates) and the Free Unixes was not a ‘joke’ anymore.
Do not make the same mistakes, or you will discover too late that windows is not a ‘joke’ anymore.
*adds another no-ip dns name to his server* One more for Apache! Now everybody at home do the same, we’ll teach MS and their stack of parked domains!
I feel uneasy about the current web server situation, having Apache and IIS as the only major players makes them very tempting targets. Fortunately the category “others” is on the rise again in this survey and there sure are a lot of them [1].
Personally looking out for Cherokee and lighttpd.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_servers
Edited 2007-02-03 21:38
I have watched Lighttpd for a while, and used it on a large forum.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for static content, but it lags behind Apache in Dynamic stuff.
I spent quite a while configuring and tweaking both and Apache ended up coming out in top for us.
I’ve also seen a lot of people saying how Lighttpd has been unstable for them under heavy load in certain Ruby on Rails situations too.
I’m still keeping an eye on the project though, it will mature over time but at the current moment, I still found Apache better, I’ve yet to check out Cherokee
Cherokee is even more lightweight than lighttpd and packs even fewer options. I’ve found lighttpd with php-cgi reasonable fast with dynamic content, but that was in my situation ofcourse
Unfortunately, this upward trend for IIS is only going to continue. There’s a LOT of people developing with .net these days, and while you can install plugins for apache, it’s a lot easier to run a windows infrastructure. Most company IT divisions seem to be exclusively microsoft shops. I occasionally train web developers on dreamweaver, and a lot of these guys don’t even know what php is.
You know, it’s kind of ironic, but I see Apple as being the premier open-source advocate these days, what with osx being packaged with apache, and osx server with mysql.
“Unfortunately, this upward trend for IIS is only going to continue.”
How is that unfortunate? IIS is a simple, robust, secure, extensible, fast web server. Sure it only runs on Windows, but you can have your pick of runtimes (ala PHP, Coldfusion, JSP, etc) to run on top of it with minimal hassle or configuration. I don’t usually laud MS for the quality of their software, but IIS ranks in the top 5% of any product out on the market at this time.
As far as the exclusivity of MS in IT shops…I too have found this to be true in MORGS, but most companies with more than a couple thousand employees are mixed, and for good reason. The good news is that most of the major vendors seem to be playing very nicely with each other lately, which makes the end resuls of writing software that targets the best platform from a business decision making standpoint that much easier. IT shops generally don’t care about the platform, they care about time to market, ROI, and other business related factors.
How is that unfortunate? IIS is a simple, robust, secure, extensible, fast web server.
For the most part, I agree. There’s nothing wrong with IIS, and it’s pretty darned simple to administer, which makes it all the more useful to your small/medium business it dept. I feel that apache represents freedom from the (sometimes absurd, at least for your average joe) business-licensing rules of microsoft. If I build an office football pool web app, and want to host it with IIS on my windows xp pro machine, I had better hope that no more than 10 people view it at a time. If I’m running a LAMP stack, I’m free from those sort of restrictions.
In general, I think microsoft makes some excellent software, it’s just the restrictions they place on you using it that gets to me. I can pirate a copy of win2k3 server, or I can fight the man legitimately with apache. Seeing less apache just makes me think that people are getting complacent (minimizes pirated copy of dreamweaver…)
The drumbeat in the media these days is how everyone is concerned about being so reliant on Microsoft, being locked in and all, yet they dive headlong down the path that makes it harder and harder to escape.
I have experienced many corporate IT depts that are exclusive .net shops. So there is an dissonant chord ringing there.