

June 2011 Web Server Survey - rytis
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/06/07/june-2011-web-server-survey.html

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powertower
I'm all for elevating Apache above IIS (as my product uses it:
<http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper>) but...

Comparing the two over all domains is ridiculous as this includes mass domains
such as parked domains which can easily give Apache 10s of millions of useless
stat points as one registrar switches a couple of servers.

The very last graph is the most sensible one which compares the two over the
top 1 million domains and shows IIS to have a relatively stable share over
time.

A better graph would compare the top 100,000 sites running on dedicated IPs or
servers (no shared hosting accounts) that have existed for at least 6 months.

~~~
bad_user
Why not include shared hosting accounts? Isn't convenience and cost of shared
hosting a valuable metric?

~~~
powertower
The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been
anywhere near the shared hosting space.

My suggestion with removing the shared hosting accounts was just a way to
remove noise from the dataset so we are truly comparing apples to apples
rather than apples to oranges... Otherwise you could end up seeing IIS loose
in a market space that it never was in (and never will be in) because Apache
gained in it.

It was just a suggestion. You could leave shared hosting in.

~~~
bad_user

        The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using
        IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting 
        space
    

That's not from a lack of trying on Microsoft's part.

And eliminating shared-hosting from a statistic like this is exactly how
Microsoft would do it - introducing bias to turn the numbers in their favor.

Does EC2 count as shared hosting btw? What about Heroku?

    
    
         to remove noise from the dataset
    

Sure, I'm all for removing parked domains. But there are lots of business and
professionals that have their website hosted with shared accounts, websites
that are useful for their target audience, even though they may not be in the
TOP-whatever. Excluding those websites from such a metric would do a
disservice to people.

    
    
        Otherwise you could end up seeing IIS loose in a 
        market space that it never was in
    

Or you could say that you would see IIS win in a market space that's getting
crushed by shared hosting.

It's a comparison of popularity between similar front-end web servers, which
does have something to say about cost and feasibility of hosting multiple
websites on top of cheap servers. Otherwise the comparison is useless, as
popularity doesn't really matter to big corporations and startups that know
what they are doing and are likely to choose Nginx anyway.

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po
I constantly hear of web services shutting down and I feel guilty for not
appreciating them at the time. I'm not going to make that mistake this time.

Netcraft has been at it basically as long as I have. I don't read their survey
reports regularly but maybe I should. Their archives are awesome. Remember the
SCO saga?

[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/12/15/outages_continu...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/12/15/outages_continue_at_sco.html)

Thanks Netcraft!

Also, I love their anachronistic logo.

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luu
Doesn't this data look, perhaps, too noisy to be trusted? What happened
between March 2009 and March 2010? Did 'other' really steal a huge chunk of
share from Apache and IIS, and then suddenly give it back? It seems more
likely that things were misclassified then (or that they were actually
classified correctly then, and that they're misclassified now).

If the data can be trusted, it's interesting that IIS has basically been flat
from 1998 'til now, with an upward deviation every once in a while.

This headline seems link bait-y. "Apach the only serious player". Really? When
IIS has ~ 20% share? So, Apple must not be a serious player in the
desktop/laptop market, since their share is in that ballpark.

~~~
dfranke
The canonical linkbait headline would clearly have been, "IIS is dead.
Netcraft confirms it."

~~~
brudgers
You left out the "Balmer Fails Again:" prefix.

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stephen_g
It's great that the open source solutions are so strong in this market. It's
nice to see nginx carving out a nice bit of market share too.

Another web server project I quite like is Cherokee (<http://www.cherokee-
project.com/>) - it's got a lot of features but still manages to beat Apache,
lighthttpd and nginx in a lot of benchmarks. It's got quite a nice web
interface to control it too but it's a bit annoying to not have configuration
files for automated setups...

~~~
moozeek
+1 for Cherokee. We use it with php5-fpm - it's rock solid, low on memory
consumption and super fast. The admin interface rocks. You can edit the config
file by hand or by scripts, the file is just not very "human readable".

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nhebb
I think the most interesting thing is the the last graph - "Market Share for
Top Servers Across the Million Busiest Sites". Apache has held steady over the
past 3 years, yet the decline of IIS is mirrored by the growth of nginx.

~~~
callmevlad
I know a few shops where IIS servers were hidden behind an nginx layer, which
would agree with your statement - but does not necessarily mean that IIS is no
longer used, just not publicly visible.

~~~
cincinnatus
This is exactly right. There is a great scenario for using nginx out in front
of any number of workhorse app servers.

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mattwdelong
I'm curious how many people here choose Nginx over Apache. If I have a choice
in my stack, I will always choose Nginx but all too often if I'm doing work
for someone else, they always demand Apache. I think it's because it's the
"defacto standard" and tends to be well known among less technical people. I'm
sure the same situation goes for people who prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL.

I guess my question being, how would you convince people to use your favorite
stack, and sometimes the best service for the job, such as Nginx/PostgreSQL,
when all they know is the most popular services. Sometimes, just convincing
them it's the best for the job is not enough.

~~~
rbranson
The choice of nginx vs Apache over MySQL vs PostgreSQL is not an equal
comparison at all. Until the application hits very high hit rates, the web
server choice is mostly inconsequential. RDBMS choice will have real impact on
the developers from the outset.

~~~
mattwdelong
That's fair. I was merely looking for another comparison and the
MySQL/PostgreSQL debate came to mind. I can't really think of anything that
similarly compares to Apache/nginx.

~~~
rbranson
Linux distributions? Usually not important until you're building your own
packages or needing to heavily customize.

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k33n
I noticed that "Google" was one of the servers listed in the chart. I'm
curious, does that mean "Google App Engine"? Or something else?

~~~
sofuture
Google has their own internal web server software.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_web_server#Software>

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euroclydon
Looking at the second to last chart, IIS lost 14 million servers in the summer
of 2009. Google picked up 6 million over this period, and Apache four. That
still leaves four million servers which vanished, and I'm sure all the lost
IIS instances didn't translate directly to Apache or Google.

~~~
Macha
Furthermore, Google doesn't use IIS, and doesn't release their server
publicly. Those 6 million were more than likely new servers picked up, which
puts the number of vanished IIS servers at 10 million.

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tectonic
For a more general breakdown across technologies, check out
<http://underthesite.com> \- it's still very much in development, but it now
shows technology reach graphs.

Feedback appreciated.

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Maro
I heard that MS pays GoDaddy to run their parked domain on IIS to boost their
stats?

~~~
yahelc
Dunno if they pay, but it seems to be the case that those do use IIS. Response
headers from one of my GoDaddy parked domains:

    
    
        Server:Microsoft-IIS/6.0
        X-AspNet-Version:2.0.50727
        X-Powered-By:ASP.NET

~~~
PonyGumbo
Godaddy.com also runs on IIS, so it may just be a company/cultural preference.

~~~
rbanffy
I once worked for a company that had a large Java-based application. Microsoft
(a then client) demanded the application should run on IIS and be written in
.NET or they wouldn't hire us.

That may be part of the deal.

Note: We wrote an IIS-based proxy that masked away the Java-ness of the
application and replaced it with .NET-ness. Worked perfectly.

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tbeutel
If the third chart were a chart of the economy, I would swear that Microsoft
IIS was a perfect representation of the housing/financial bubble. I can't
think of why there would be a correlation though.

~~~
spydum
Small businesses closing up shop? If you can't afford your house, how can you
afford your hosting bill? Just a WAG

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skilesare
I've done a ton and moved a ton of my little projects to appharbor. It is just
so damn easy. I can't imagine that MVC 3 is reducing the number of IIS
installations. It is very, very slick. They probably count that as one and if
db ids are any indications there are probably getting close to 100s of
thousands of apps being hosted there.

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invisible
So this is the number of boxes that nginx is installed on... I wonder how many
page requests are served rather than number of hostnames. The faster
nginx/lighttpd installs are likely serving way more requests per server
(unless they are just used for static resource files by in large). That would
be much more interesting.

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mahrain
Microsoft won market share when they were competing actively on web platforms
and services. Their ASP, ActiveX and such technologies were real contenders a
few years ago, competing with the likes of PHP. It seems they aren't competing
with HTML5, given up on Windows Media and the internet has moved on, leaving
them behind.

~~~
tjogin
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Microsoft _are_ competing on the
server with ASP.NET, and _shouldn't_ be competing with HTML5.

