Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/11/07/november-2011-web-server-survey.html

by mike-cardwell • 15 years ago

82 41 15 years ago

news.netcraft.com

DiabloD3• 15 years ago

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

bricestacey• 15 years ago

It is within 1% across all sites. Across large sites it's 7%.

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

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"

jinushaun2• 15 years ago

One could also read it as "IIS requires 7% more servers to run 1% more websites than nginx". Hmm... Sounds like a potential blog post...

dos1• 15 years ago

Netcraft confirms it!

(Sorry, the old ways die hard :)

davedx• 15 years ago

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

Apache is the real winner here.

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

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.

jinushaun2• 15 years ago

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.

infocaptor• 15 years ago

I recently hosted my SAAS on Linode nginx (https://www.wireframes.org)

Linode has stack scripts for the LEMP stack (linode uses "E" for the njinx). I agree there should be similar stack for windows to increase adoption

spindritf• 15 years ago

> linode uses "E" for the njinx

Apparently, nginx is meant to be pronounced "engine x."

nknight• 15 years ago

I think the statistics are entirely irrelevant now -- if they were ever relevant in the first place.

Almost everything serious runs behind some sort of proxy, and those proxies often front for heterogeneous back-end systems, and even those back-ends might offload some of their logic to other systems.

There are too many interweaved layers in complex web services, and too many parts that can be (and routinely are) put together in too many different ways. The identity of the front-end is interesting only in a rather attenuated sense, and it can usually be trivially swapped out for another.

notatoad2• 15 years ago

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.

eCa2• 15 years ago

You don't need to run your own server to have a choice. Running a VPS with root access is cheap these days. Even on a shared server to still have choice (at least IIS vs Apache).

Of course, you also have a choice not to care, but then you probably don't do any server side programming.

billpatrianakos• 15 years ago

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.

joelhaasnoot2• 15 years ago

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...

jroseattle3• 15 years ago

Very good observation. Netcraft is not measuring internal corporate servers. It can only measure what it can reach -- publicly accessible domains.

Would be interesting to know just how many of those exist.

marshray2• 15 years ago

It would also be interesting to know how many of those IIS sites are just companies Outlook Web Access and MS Terminal Services gateways. Lots of things will serve you some HTML over port 80 that aren't what we think of as "web sites".

jeffreymcmanus• 15 years ago

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.

joelhaasnoot2• 15 years ago

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.

jroseattle3• 15 years ago

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-...), 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.

walkon• 15 years ago

I don't think they are referring to Google App Engine specifically, but all servers from Google running their own custom http server (where the http response header for Server = "gws"). That's pretty significant, considering how much traffic Google servers get.

jbarham• 15 years ago

> 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.

jroseattle3• 15 years ago

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

euroclydon• 15 years ago

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

recoiledsnake2• 15 years ago

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.

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

Isn't it free as in "comes with an operating system"?

marshray2• 15 years ago

Right, but the server OS can run you $K.

bad_user• 15 years ago

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).

recoiledsnake2• 15 years ago

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]

eCa2• 15 years ago

IIS (MS) plays a different game compared to e.g. Apache. Since the Apache Foundation is non-profit, I doubt they define "winning" by revenue.

zokier• 15 years ago

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

notatoad2• 15 years ago

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.

JonoW2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

maw• 15 years ago

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

JonoW2• 15 years ago

As @maw said, most top sites remove the http headers that identify the web-server. Also, if you had to take the top, I don't know, 10k sites by traffic, I would imagine all of them use a load-balancer, so how can netcraft know what the web-server is behind them?

kgen• 15 years ago

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

garazy• 15 years ago

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.

Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share

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