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I'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... Co

I'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 ago
Why not include shared hosting accounts? Isn't convenience and cost of shared hosting a valuable metric?
- powertower 15y ago
  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.
  - seldo 15y ago
    It'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 ago
      It'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.
  - rmc 15y ago
    The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting space. The purpose of collecting these stats is not to find out how IIS is doing in it's target market, but instead to find out how popular web servers are. If I were to suggest removing all non-Free OSs from the statistics (since one could claim that as a Free web server Apache doesn't compete there), then you'd see totally different numbers aswell, and that would just as deceptive.
    - powertower 15y ago
      Thats quite a drastic move, to remove all non-Free OSs. No one is suggesting this. Also note that the original title posted here was something like : "IIS loses market share, it sucks, down to 1998 levels."
      - rmc 15y ago
        No, no-one suggesting removing non-free OSs. However the grandparent post suggested removing shared hosting, since IIS doesn't compete there. This would fudge the stats in IIS's favour, in the same way that removing non-Free OSs would fudge the stats in Apache's favour.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    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.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
      - PaulHoule 15y ago
        Not entirely true. You can get cheap IIS hosting and cheap hosting with ASP.NET. Microsoft also has a web edition of SQL Server which is licensed at a reasonable rate for people who want to use it on a dedi/vhost or in shared hosting. If you like IIS & SQL Server in shared hosting it's a reasonable option. Frankly, more people like PHP + MySQL. If you like Windows you can run that on Windows but people and hosting providers.tend to like Unix more.
      - bad_user 15y ago
        Microsoft has never tried to compete in the $5-10 dollar shared hosting space, EVER. http://www.microsoft.com/web/hosting/home http://www.microsoft.com/web/hosting/home On GoDaddy Windows/IIS hosting starts at $4.99, and Microsoft is known to cut deals with such providers. I also remember a talk from MIX in which a microsofty said Microsoft is working with hosting providers to give devs an alternative just as cheap as EC2 Linux instances.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting space. The sample is self-selecting. Since you pretty much can't do shared hosting on it, IIS competes in a segment that doesn't use shared hosting. If you select enough your sample you'll end up with one that supports the theory IIS is The Greatest Web Server That Ever Was.
    - powertower 15y ago
      Comparing in non-competing spaces vs. comparing in competing spaces. I choose the latter. No one is suggesting reducing the sample further down with cherry picking.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        And how's that not cherry picking? If you decide to compare IIS with Apache only in the segments IIS is present, aren't you cherry picking already?
        powertower 15y ago
        It's not cherry picking because the original title of this post suggested that IIS had lost marketshare to IIS and returned to it's 1998 levels. My comment pointed out that this is not true because Apache gains are not IIS losses 1-for-1.
        rbanffy 15y ago
        IIS lost marketshare to Apache (and to nginx and Google) and returned to 1998 levels. That has nothing to do with Apache gaining all of IIS losses. Anyway, Apache is growing fast at about the same click IIS is shrinking.
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
PaulHoule 15y ago
Yeah, there was a case a few years ago where IIS surged ahead because Microsoft convinced a big domain parker to switch. Personally I like Apache for bulk hosting. It's easy to write scripts that can deploy thousands of sites. There's a scripting interface to IIS that would let you do that too, but it's just so easy to write a script that prints lines into a configuration file. There are a lot of things to explain in that graph. Assuming that an anomaly in Netcraft doesn't explain some of the bumps it seems like there were a lot of drops in the year after the 2008 financial crisis and also it seems like someone's gone bananas registering names in the last few years.
ww 15y ago
>>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. If we are counting web server use, and mass domains are an example of web server use, you would need to say more than just 'mass domains are useless'. Otherwise that is just special pleading. On the other hand, if we are counting 'useful domains', you would need to say why you think mass domains don't count as 'useful'. You only said that they could switch often. I would say mass domains count as a 'useful' because they still have some kind of exposure security wise. They also demonstrate provisioning costs (or lack thereof) and provisioning speed.

bad_user 15y ago

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

powertower 15y ago
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.
- seldo 15y ago
  It'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 ago
    It'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.
- rmc 15y ago
  The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting space. The purpose of collecting these stats is not to find out how IIS is doing in it's target market, but instead to find out how popular web servers are. If I were to suggest removing all non-Free OSs from the statistics (since one could claim that as a Free web server Apache doesn't compete there), then you'd see totally different numbers aswell, and that would just as deceptive.
  - powertower 15y ago
    Thats quite a drastic move, to remove all non-Free OSs. No one is suggesting this. Also note that the original title posted here was something like : "IIS loses market share, it sucks, down to 1998 levels."
    - rmc 15y ago
      No, no-one suggesting removing non-free OSs. However the grandparent post suggested removing shared hosting, since IIS doesn't compete there. This would fudge the stats in IIS's favour, in the same way that removing non-Free OSs would fudge the stats in Apache's favour.
- bad_user 15y ago
  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.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - PaulHoule 15y ago
      Not entirely true. You can get cheap IIS hosting and cheap hosting with ASP.NET. Microsoft also has a web edition of SQL Server which is licensed at a reasonable rate for people who want to use it on a dedi/vhost or in shared hosting. If you like IIS & SQL Server in shared hosting it's a reasonable option. Frankly, more people like PHP + MySQL. If you like Windows you can run that on Windows but people and hosting providers.tend to like Unix more.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      Microsoft has never tried to compete in the $5-10 dollar shared hosting space, EVER. http://www.microsoft.com/web/hosting/home http://www.microsoft.com/web/hosting/home On GoDaddy Windows/IIS hosting starts at $4.99, and Microsoft is known to cut deals with such providers. I also remember a talk from MIX in which a microsofty said Microsoft is working with hosting providers to give devs an alternative just as cheap as EC2 Linux instances.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting space. The sample is self-selecting. Since you pretty much can't do shared hosting on it, IIS competes in a segment that doesn't use shared hosting. If you select enough your sample you'll end up with one that supports the theory IIS is The Greatest Web Server That Ever Was.
  - powertower 15y ago
    Comparing in non-competing spaces vs. comparing in competing spaces. I choose the latter. No one is suggesting reducing the sample further down with cherry picking.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      And how's that not cherry picking? If you decide to compare IIS with Apache only in the segments IIS is present, aren't you cherry picking already?
      - powertower 15y ago
        It's not cherry picking because the original title of this post suggested that IIS had lost marketshare to IIS and returned to it's 1998 levels. My comment pointed out that this is not true because Apache gains are not IIS losses 1-for-1.
        rbanffy 15y ago
        IIS lost marketshare to Apache (and to nginx and Google) and returned to 1998 levels. That has nothing to do with Apache gaining all of IIS losses. Anyway, Apache is growing fast at about the same click IIS is shrinking.
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]

PaulHoule 15y ago

Yeah, there was a case a few years ago where IIS surged ahead because Microsoft convinced a big domain parker to switch. Personally I like Apache for bulk hosting. It's easy to write scripts that can deploy thousands of sites. There's a scripting interface to IIS that would let you do that too, but it's just so easy to write a script that prints lines into a configuration file. There are a lot of things to explain in that graph. Assuming that an anomaly in Netcraft doesn't explain some of the bumps it seems like there were a lot of drops in the year after the 2008 financial crisis and also it seems like someone's gone bananas registering names in the last few years.

ww 15y ago

>>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. If we are counting web server use, and mass domains are an example of web server use, you would need to say more than just 'mass domains are useless'. Otherwise that is just special pleading. On the other hand, if we are counting 'useful domains', you would need to say why you think mass domains don't count as 'useful'. You only said that they could switch often. I would say mass domains count as a 'useful' because they still have some kind of exposure security wise. They also demonstrate provisioning costs (or lack thereof) and provisioning speed.