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June 2011 Web Server Survey
- mahrain 15y agoMicrosoft 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.
- k33n 15y agoI 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 15y agoGoogle has their own internal web server software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_web_server#Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_web_server#Software
- hello_moto 15y agoGoogle Apps as well perhaps.
- euroclydon 15y agoLooking 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 15y agoFurthermore, 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.
- powertower 15y agoI'm all for elevating Apache above IIS (as my product uses it: http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper 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 15y agoWhy not include shared hosting accounts? Isn't convenience and cost of shared hosting a valuable metric?
- powertower 15y agoThe 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.
- seldo 15y agoIt's an apples to apples comparison of "what hosting software is used across all domains", not "what hosting software is used across all domains in the space Microsoft competes for". That may not be a particularly useful metric in business terms, but it is at least a fair comparison.
- edanm 15y agoIt's not about fairness, it's about educating. People create these stats for a reason. If the reason is to show that one side or the other is "losing", whatever that means, they should go ahead and chose whatever they want. (I am not implying that's what you were saying or anything). On the other hand, if the point is to educate people on which software is more used in a meaningful sense, the article would be better if it had the grandparent's explanation at the top, explaining why the comparison should be done only in one specific market, and then do the comparison in that market. I for one wouldn't have thought about it, and gotten the wrong impression.
- Maro 15y agoI heard that MS pays GoDaddy to run their parked domain on IIS to boost their stats?
- yahelc 15y agoDunno 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 15y agoGodaddy.com also runs on IIS, so it may just be a company/cultural preference.
- rbanffy 15y agoI 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'
- rbanffy 15y agoI 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.
- icey 15y agoGoDaddy is one of the major .Net shops in the Phoenix area. As far as I know, they're predominately .Net.
- rbanffy 15y agoI wonder how many of the 59,646,778 are parked there. Must have been expensive.
- skilesare 15y agoI'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.
- nhebb 15y agoI 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 15y agoI 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 15y agoThis is exactly right. There is a great scenario for using nginx out in front of any number of workhorse app servers.
- nhebb 15y agoInteresting - I didn't know that those worlds mixed. :) BTW, I wasn't trying to imply that nginx was directly replacing IIS. I interpreted it to mean that sites running nginx are breaking into the top million at a faster rate and sites running IIS are dropping out at a faster rate.
- luu 15y agoDoesn'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.
- mattwdelong 15y agoI'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.
- bad_user 15y agoApache is easier to configure and provides a bunch of useful plugins that Nginx doesn't. It's more trustworthy in a shared-hosting environment too.
- TylerE 15y agoI'd argue the opposite. I find nginx config much more flexible, and compact.
- mattwdelong 15y agoI agree, that's one of the reason why I choose it. I love the config file structure, and feel it's actually much quicker to get a new host up and running on nginx over Apache.
- bad_user 15y agoThen try configuring/running mod_wsgi for nginx.
- TylerE 15y agohttp://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/hosting-django-under-nginx-scgi-and-wsgi/ http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/hosting-django-under-nginx-s... Doesn't look bad at all. ~10 required lines, all of which are just telling nginx how to call wsgi and what params to pass. Very similar to the apache config to do the exact same thing.
- tbeutel 15y agoIf 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 15y agoSmall businesses closing up shop? If you can't afford your house, how can you afford your hosting bill? Just a WAG
- stephen_g 15y agoIt'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/ 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 15y ago+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".
- invisible 15y agoSo 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.
- po 15y agoI 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_continue_at_sco.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/12/15/outages_continu... Thanks Netcraft! Also, I love their anachronistic logo.
- tectonic 15y agoFor a more general breakdown across technologies, check out http://underthesite.com http://underthesite.com - it's still very much in development, but it now shows technology reach graphs. Feedback appreciated.