

Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share - mike-cardwell
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/11/07/november-2011-web-server-survey.html

======
jroseattle
I love statistics. They can be used to say just about whatever one desires.

The goal of the post seems to be to show relevance and traction gains in the
market. The charts from netcraft that discuss all domains are pointless for
that, because domains are a dime a dozen. What we should pay attention to are
the numbers across the busiest sites.

First, is a million sites a good measure? Netcraft has identified just over
180 million websites, so the million busiest sites seems a pretty good
assessment. To be useful, we need to see how nginx fares in the market of
websites where these decisions count. So, the busiest million sites is a good
measure for that.

Of the four servers identified (Google App Engine is a toy, shouldn't be on
this list), nginx is the only one that actually made quantifiable gains in the
two months compared. Both Apache and Microsoft/IIS took steps back. In this
consideration, nginx sits at 8% share, which is essentially "statistically
relevant". But even then, it's only one month of data. A longer term view is
more relevant.

Back in April
([http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/04/06/april-2011-web-...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/04/06/april-2011-web-
server-survey.html)), nginx was measured in the same context at 6.5% of these
same sites; half a year later, nginx sits at 8%.

Here's the summary: nginx is making relevant market share gains in the web
server space, and is taking share from both Microsoft/IIS and Apache.

~~~
jbarham
> Google App Engine is a toy

Compared to what? Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but last time I
checked building fault-tolerant, arbitrarily scalable distributed systems was
still pretty hard.

~~~
jroseattle
Compared to other web servers that don't put programmatic limitations or
restrictions in place?

------
jinushaun
I wonder how many websites use nginx as a web server instead of simply as a
reverse proxy server.

What nginx really needs is something like WAMP or MAMP to really spur
adoption. I suspect lot of beginner web developers use Apache and MySQL
because they're both installed by default on hosting providers. On Windows,
you can't beat one-click WAMP installs.

~~~
notatoad
beginning web developers don't run their own servers. they might run wamp on a
local test machine, but everybody deploys to cheap shared hosts where they
don't have a choice of server.

I don't know (or particularly care) what my personal site is running on. i pay
dreamhost a couple bucks and they take care of all that boring stuff for me.

~~~
billpatrianakos
I agree. I'm a beginner and have used Apache because it's just what comes with
everything. My non-toy sites always use Apache as I know I'm less prone to
trouble because of my experience with it.

I do have a VPS account with Webbynode which lets you run several Linux
flavors, and a choice of nix, apache, or node which is cool but still scary
for someone like me who is comfortable with the command line on my own file
system but a little shaky when SSH-img into my VPS.

This might sound dumb, but I'm a server newbie. What I've always wondered is
why anyone would use IIS at all? It seems like all MS products make you jump
through hoops to do simple things that work on Apache ad others with just a
click or simple command. It's been a while since I've experienced it so I wish
I could point to so,etching more solid but I remember a few years back having
to install PHP on IIS with MySQL and it was a pain plus not everything worked
by default and there was just a lot of hoops to jump through just to get a
simple CRUD app online. What does IIS offer that others don't?

Also, why does most enterprise software get built with ASP and .NET? I'm in a
CIS program in college and they're all about teaching us Microsoft
technologies and I can't stand it because I feel like I'll be using languages,
frameworks, and other tech that's open for the most part in real world
situations (I don't plan to be a corporate programmer, I'm already in business
for myself). Please excuse my ignorance, I really do just wonder, I could be
thinking totally backwards here.

~~~
Encosia
It depends on your clients and/or the work you're doing. On the server-side, I
do almost entirely ASP.NET work for small and medium business. Much of that is
public-facing and you wouldn't know it was .NET unless you viewed the source
and looked pretty closely. You certainly can build drab, enterprisey software
with ASP.NET (or any other language), but you can also build sites like Stack
Overflow just as easily.

Trying to host an ASP.NET 4/MVC3 site on Apache would be a nightmare. So, for
the same reason you might tend to avoid IIS for your PHP work, .NET developers
will prefer IIS for their work.

As for why so much "enterprise" software is written in languages like C# and
Java, I believe it has a lot to do with those companies having very large
teams with high turnover. Static languages (and their tooling) do have some
compelling advantages in that situation.

------
joelhaasnoot
I wonder how accurate this is in some ways. Yes, Nginx is powering the web,
but what about all those corporate servers behind firewalls running (custom)
.NET or Java apps. Those aren't measured at all.

I think IIS in many ways is a different market...

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
Yes -- the vast majority of IIS implementations are run behind corporate
firewalls -- they won't show up in surveys like this. These stats don't show
web server popularity, they show the popularity of _public_ web servers.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Even public is debatable, many web application servers or servers requiring
accounts likely won't be hit. The percentage of all HTTP requests that are to
servers they measure will likely be pretty low.

------
zokier
Whats with the near-vertical growth of hostnames in 2011?

~~~
notatoad
likely a change in the way netcraft counts things. i remember looking at some
other netcraft graph with a similar jump, and after some research i found that
it was because they decided to count every single blog on a chinese blogging
service as a separate hostname. similar to counting every
[username].tumblr.com as a separate host.

------
garazy
In terms of the top sites using nginx they saw a big gain this week -

<http://trends.builtwith.com/Web-Server/nginx>

Whilst IIS7 is gaining market share it's as the expense of IIS in general
losing market share.

------
davedx
Nginx's share actually went down, just MS's share went down more.

Apache is the real winner here.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Yes, there are several ways to look at these statistics. You could also say:

Microsofts total number of active sites increased by more than Nginx's.

Or:

Relative to their totals, Nginx's number of active sites increased by more
than Microsofts.

I think it will be interesting to see nginx push IIS into third place. I hope
it manages to take some of Apaches share too. I'm a big user of Apache, but
I'd like to see some more competition up there.

------
DiabloD3
Misleading headline, its still 7% short in total servers polled.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I prefer the description "100% accurate" to "misleading".

If I'd have used "Market Share" instead of "Active Site Market Share", you
might have had a point.

Would you have prefered this title? ...

"Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share and within 7% of Server
Number Market Share"

------
JonoW
Question; how does netcraft determine what web-server serves a particular
domain? Most big sites hide those details in http headers, so how do they
tell?

~~~
hbar
...Read the HTTP headers? I think you answered your own question.

~~~
maw
I think GP meant that they hide that info even in their headers, such that you
can't just see what's in Server:.

------
kgen
Woah, where did all those domains (300m+ over a year) come from?

------
recoiledsnake
Isn't it true that IIS makes the most profit out of all the web servers and
thus 'wins'? Just like that iPhone vs. Android argument.

~~~
bad_user
Profits related to the iPhone tells you something about its users - money
spenders, good market to target. Profits related to IIS, unless you're in the
business of selling breain-dead. NET components, only tells you how fucked up
you are for choosing a commercial web server, when the alternatives are not
only better but also free and also preferred by the top busiest sites ever
(except MSDN).

~~~
recoiledsnake
Uh wow.That's not even wrong. Not sure if I should reply to a troll.

Even if what you said is true, how does it change the fact that MS makes the
most money out of web servers and not others?

StackOverflow, NewEgg, PlentyOfFish etc. are not busy sites now? It's funny to
see how StackOverflow was able to scale easily while Reddit couldn't. There's
a lot more to running high traffic sites than just the web server.

Maybe you should enlighten the companies below?

Costco - <http://www.costco.com/> [costco.com] Crate & Barrel -
<http://www.crateandbarrel.com/> [crateandbarrel.com] Home Shopping Network -
<http://www.hsn.com/> [hsn.com] Buy.com - <http://www.buy.com/> [buy.com] Dell
- <http://www.dell.com/> [dell.com] Nasdaq - <http://www.nasdaq.com/>
[nasdaq.com] Virgin - <http://www.virgin.com/> [virgin.com] 7-Eleven -
<http://www.7-eleven.com/> [7-eleven.com] Carnival Cruise Lines -
<http://www.carnival.com/> [carnival.com] L'Oreal - <http://www.loreal.com/>
[loreal.com] Remax - <http://www.remax.com/> [remax.com] Monster Jobs -
<http://www.monster.com/> [monster.com] USA Today - <http://www.usatoday.com/>
[usatoday.com] ComputerJobs.com - <http://computerjobs.com/>
[computerjobs.com] Match.com - <http://www.match.com/> [match.com] National
Health Services (UK) - <http://www.nhs.uk/> [www.nhs.uk] CarrerBuilder.com -
<http://www.careerbuilder.com/> [careerbuilder.com] Newegg
<http://newegg.com/> [newegg.com] Geico <http://geico.com/> [geico.com]
Capital One <http://capitalone.com/> [capitalone.com] Zecco
<http://zecco.com/> [zecco.com]

------
dos1
Netcraft confirms it!

(Sorry, the old ways die hard :)

------
euroclydon
I doubt NGinx is gaining much market share at the expense of IIS.

