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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
+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".
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.
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.
Interesting - 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.
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.
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.
Depends. At the very low end of hardware, it makes a big difference too. My VPS originally had 360mb RAM and Apache would fall over during traffic spikes. I switched to nginx and the problems went away.
That said, someone who knows more about configuring Apache for performance likely would not have this problem. I'm just a developer throwing up a blog, however, and switching to nginx was quicker than figuring out how to make Apache work better.
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.
I 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.
It's not the same - you have to compile Nginx with mod_wsgi support. It's not as simple as doing an "apt-get install nginx" and it may compile with your version, or it may not compile.
mod_wsgi is an interesting example. Surely it has the wrong architecture for Nginx and something better could surely be written. But mod_wsgi for Apache simply kicks ass, being a server that manages everything for you with low overhead and good performance caracteristics. No need for supervisord or any of that crap.
Some people go as far as recommending running Nginx in front of Apache, with all the overhead that brings, just for mod_wsgi (although the same could be said about mod_php).
That's the thing about Apache - it's so mature and has so much traction that you can find quality plugins for anything and everything, being an all you can eat buffet.
But then if you're going to put Nginx in front of Apache, why go with Nginx instead of Varnish: http://www.varnish-cache.org/ -- which is designed from the ground-up to function as a high-performance proxy cache (the Nginx plugin for proxy caching sucks donkey balls IMHO)
What I'm trying to say here is that Nginx is very far from a one-size-fits-all. It's awesome for at least one website I've got written in Ruby on Rails and I'm using it in combination with Passenger (Ruby's mod_wsgi).
But for all my other use-cases, I'm starting with Apache first, then reconsider the move to Nginx or not.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.