June 2011 Web Server Survey

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/06/07/june-2011-web-server-survey.html

by rytis • 15 years ago

81 59 15 years ago

news.netcraft.com

mahrain• 15 years ago

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.

xxpor• 15 years ago

Do you think that people aren't writing C# web services any more?

tjogin• 15 years ago

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.

k33n• 15 years ago

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?

sofuture2• 15 years ago

Google has their own internal web server software.

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

hello_moto• 15 years ago

Google Apps as well perhaps.

euroclydon• 15 years ago

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.

Macha2• 15 years ago

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.

powertower5• 15 years ago

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_user5• 15 years ago

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

powertower5• 15 years 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.

PaulHoule• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

Maro• 15 years ago

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

yahelc• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

I wonder how many of the 59,646,778 are parked there.

Must have been expensive.

skilesare• 15 years ago

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.

nhebb2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

nhebb2• 15 years ago

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.

luu• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

brudgers• 15 years ago

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

mattwdelong4• 15 years ago

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.

bad_user5• 15 years ago

Apache 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.

TylerE2• 15 years ago

I'd argue the opposite. I find nginx config much more flexible, and compact.

sofuture2• 15 years ago

Recently tried to choose nginx -- Mono fastcgi is a trainwreck though, and mod_mono works well enough.

I'll switch to nginx as soon as that situation changes.

rbranson2• 15 years ago

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.

mattwdelong4• 15 years ago

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.

Macha2• 15 years ago

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.

tbeutel• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

stephen_g• 15 years ago

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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

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.

po• 15 years ago

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...

Thanks Netcraft!

Also, I love their anachronistic logo.

tectonic• 15 years ago

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.

June 2011 Web Server Survey

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