Guest post by With financial backing from the likes of Michael Dell and other venture capitalists, open source upstart Nginx has edged out Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) to hold the title of second-most widely used Web server among all active websites. What’s more, according to Netcraft’s January 2012 Web Server Survey, Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share.
Wow. Good to hear. I’ve been mulling over the idea of switching over some parts of my site(s) to be handled by nginx. Pity that it’s not more widely supported out of the box by most open source CMS packages. And pity that nginx isn’t available on more budget hosts as an option to make more out of limited resources.
Edited 2012-01-05 17:00 UTC
Get a VPS.
That’s like suggesting a guy troubled by the performance of his Ford Fiesta to buy a Ferrari FF.
Er no. Have you seen VPS prices lately? Competition has caused prices to tumble. I have a 512mb ram VPS for $10/m. You can get a 384MB or 256MB ram one for even less. A VPS is an excellent alternative to shared hosting for those of us who can handle the Linux command line.
OSbunny,
“Er no. Have you seen VPS prices lately? Competition has caused prices to tumble. I have a 512mb ram VPS for $10/m. You can get a 384MB or 256MB ram one for even less.”
Can you reveal where you found that price? I haven’t found any VPS providers at anywhere close to that price in the US.
I’ve always looked for webhosting deals at webhostingtalk.com . It’s the biggest forum on the topic (at least it was a few years back, I dont really follow this market much). I used this forum to get good deals on my first shared account, the dedicated box I used to get from LayeredTech and all my VPSes. Go to the “Advertising Forums” section and you’ll find offers that are much better than those shown on hosting companies’ websites.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104 is a sub-forum dedicated to VPS offers.
I’ve been using cheapvps.co.uk for the past 3 years or so and I’m moderately satisfied – support is slow, but I didn’t need them much. Their last offer (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1089498&highlight=ch…) gets you 512 MB Ram / 16GB disk space for 7 GBP (11 USD). It’s in UK, but I’m sure you’ll find similar and cheaper offers in the US.
$11 is close enough to nothing to never consider getting a shared hosting account, won’t you agree?
I practically live on webhostingtalk and can tell you VPS prices can get extremely low. I left shared web hosting years ago and never looked back. You can also look at lowendbox.com for inexpensive VPS offers and reviews.
jaypee,
muszek,
I looked at webhostingtalk – frankly the lack of structured organization put me off, but I see you guys are right – I do see a very wide range of VPS prices (albeit from obscure vendors) from $8 to $50. I have to wonder why the range is so different for similar packages? My experience with shared hosting makes me wary of overselling, but I have to admit at those prices VPS seems irresistible enough to consider switching away from cheap shared hosting on better known vendors.
Thanks also for the link to lowendbox.com, I like how well organized it is.
Or use Amazon EC2 for free:
http://aws.amazon.com/free/
(Of course, if it is a busy site, then you will need to pay for extra bandwidth charges.)
I am well aware of the amazon EC/S3 services.
The “free” service is just a temporary promotional price to demonstrate the technology.
For loads that won’t be running 24/7, then EC2 might be a good deal since you don’t pay for the down time. But for always on service, dedicated servers will probably be both cheaper and more powerful.
The smallest EC2 virtual CPU instance still costs almost $800/year full time.
For about the same price, you can get dual core dedicated servers at 1and1 and godaddy (*) which are not only more powerful, but include storage and bandwidth costs which are additional through amazon’s service.
I realize we’re comparing apples and oranges in a way, but in filling the role transitionally assigned to 24/7 dedicated servers, I found amazon’s cloud services to be priced uncompetitively – even more so now that such cheap VPS providers have surfaced (assuming they’re not too good to be true).
Never the less, it’s a valid option and I do appreciate the link very much.
* Edit: I’m not enduring their service (especially with the recent SOPA controversy), just price comparing.
Edited 2012-01-09 04:35 UTC
That’s like suggesting to a guy troubled by the fuel consumption of his truck that he buy fuel more often.
Nginx is commonly used as a reverse proxy (I use it as one directly on my WNDR3700 router running OpenWRT) with Apache, IIS, or more nginx servers on the backend so it is hard to tell what is actually serving the pages vs. doing load balancing, reverse proxying, etc.
Either way…. its a great product. Easy to understand / configure.
Edited 2012-01-05 17:40 UTC
nginx is also very efficient at serving static pages, like IIS.
The numbers say it directly – these are publicly facing sites only.
Yep. Nothing beats apache and mod_php for PHP powered websites.
Except for every event driven web server plus PHP.
I guess I am confused by that article. They referenced Google several times, but why? Do they provide a web server?
I was confused by that too, so I went “googling” for an answer. And found this:
Google mystery server runs 13% of active websites
And only Google runs its mystery server
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/
I am sorry, I can’t give you a source, so maybe my memory is wrong (and maybe someone finds it), but I think when reading or listening something related to Go (the programming language) they said that they now use a Go based server at least for parts of their infrastructure.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/01/03/january-2012-web-serve…
Well, if you look at the third graph, it does seem to say the same thing as the article…
Edited 2012-01-05 20:53 UTC
odd thing is talking about 582,716,657 sites and making conclusion on the base of 3th table with sum about 164 millions sites.
This is because the third table is about actual websites, as opposed to automatically generated stuff, such as the commercial links that appear when one looks up a nonexistent domain name.
Bots apparently prefer Apache and IIS to nginx.
The methodology used to differentiate both is explained here : http://news.netcraft.com/active-sites/
Edited 2012-01-06 13:57 UTC
Ive never even heard of this web server. Where the hell have I been?
You are still using CERN’s aren’t you?
So, that made me think what does the first website evah ( http://info.cern.ch ) use now…
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://info.cern.ch
Apache on Linux. Well, nothing out of the ordinary / could be much worse, I guess. ;p
If it makes you feel any better, I was talking about this with a co-worker for years. I’d always suggest looking into “NI-gel-inx” while he suggested “Engine X” I just discovered last month that we were talking about the same dang server.
Nginx is very good but what starred me is that this notice is from NETCRAFT.
Microsoft is know to pay netcraft to bullshit the graphs with windows servers and IIS
Edited 2012-01-05 23:31 UTC
Actually no, you are confused.
Microsoft made deals with large domain hosters to serve their ‘parked domains’ on IIS (generic page shown for domains ‘without a website’).
That way it would inflate the usage share of IIS on the Internet so organisations like Netcraft would end up publishing graphs more favorable to IIS.
So they didn’t pay Netcraft, they gave some really large hosters ‘marketing budget’ or whatever they called it.
Those contracts probably ran out around 2009 judging by the graphs.
** citation needed **
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web_server_…
How about Netcraft themselves:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web_server_…
And some Microsoft marketing:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/mar06/03-21godaddypr….
Some random article from that time:
http://www.ducea.com/2006/06/09/netcraft-web-server-survey-or-shoul…
I have not ever used IIS of Microsoft but competing open source products. Out of them lighthttpd (for lightweight javascript testing) and nginx (for webdav) fit all my developer needs. For web-app development I use GlassFish.As a user, not as a developer I have a very bad idea about MS products, especially IIS-webdav and MS friendly administrators. It does not work with my Cyberduck and they say that they will not fix it because it is not broken, though a patch is posted by MS
Sorry, I don’t want to start a flame war about this, but I always wondered about Cherokee having so few users compared to lighttpd and nginx.
It too is small and extremely fast (in some setups it even outperforms the others), has some nice features like a good (and optional) web interface for configuration, an app store, but more importantly and this is why I use this server and think it is kinda underrated it always is that it’s always the one server where that new DoS technique doesn’t work.
Oh and I think the easy GUI and these kinda profiles for directories seem to lead to better configured server when it comes to compression and caching.
I started with lighttpd and just switched to Cherokee for testing. In fact I also have some nginx-setups, because I love that there are so many nice modules and that it is scriptable. That might become a reason to completely switch to it. However, it looks like this is something most nginx users never ever get into.
So did I miss something about Cherokee or nginx or is it just that it doesn’t receive so much hype?
I too love Cherokee and think it is very underrated. One of the main causes, IMHO, is that the GUI is frowned upon as “configuration for kids” and not something a “serious sysadmin” would use. Bollocks.
Cherokee is, at the moment, the nicest integrated package for HTTP serving, very user-friendly and with very nice features.
I think it is mostly unknown by people. I know it exists but I’ve never tried it (yet).
Yeah… so I quickly checked out if there’s a Wiki art (typically a decent quick overview), and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_(web_server)
“The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia’s general notability guideline”…