Apache down, IIS up

Doctor Memory writes "Netcraft's June 2006 web server survey is out, and it shows IIS taking a dramatic upturn, at the expense of Apache. One of the biggest reasons cited is domain registrar Go Daddy switching to IIS for the domains it "parks". The report does go on to note that IIS is also making solid gains in active sites (including some large blog hosts), and further notes that it appears that large hosting companies are dropping Linux." Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache's market share is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment.

probably on Microsoft's list of next important tar

Just a thought, but Microsoft is probably as primed as ever to move aggressively on the Web Server market. Why not sooner? For one thing they've been busy locking down or trying to lock down everything else and manage the legal and foreign consortium attacks.

And, the first few generations of IIS weren't hardened. While Microsoft can (and has) dominated markets with non-superior products (not trolling, not saying "inferior", just not the best of breed), Apache got the classical head start on Microsoft, not necessarily (if ever) assurance of ultimate victory.

I've read articles, heard people talk -- it's hard to sort fact from fiction -- but I've heard stories of Microsoft coming in with big dollars and technical help to convert high profile and LARGE targets (Go Daddy, perhaps?) to their Web Server technology.

How do you resist that? If I had a large company and had ANY issues with Apache (who doesn't have any issues with any technology?, there's always something), I'd find it tempting to accept overtures from Microsoft.... "We'll come in and convert you to IIS, AND we'll help you do it, AND we'll give you money. All you have to do is brag on it in return."

I cringe just a little when I hear reassurances like (from the slashdot summary): "but note that Apache's marketshare is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment..." I remember using that as reason to be confident about the browser market... there was a time when Microsoft IE's share was less than 5%. We all know how that bad boy ended.

If this is what Microsoft is doing (and IMO I suspect it is) this smells of once again abusing their monopoly in OS to extend their control of new markets at the expense of fair competition.

Doesn't seem to matter much if it's true, the current administration (in general) has shown little interest or appetite in reining Microsoft in.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

Thankfully, MS can only make so many gains this way. It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over. At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

I'm afraid I have to disagree.

It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over.

What makes you think they can't? They certainly have the scratch, and as they've shown in the past, they're not at all averse to taking large financial hits to ruin a competitor.

At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.

Sure, until your PHB strolls in and declares that "we're switching to Microsoft!". Remember, Microsoft doesn't have to buy^H^H^Hconvince you, they just have to convince the guy who holds the purse strings.

Money doesn't always get you everything

> It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over.

What makes you think they can't?

Little things like...oh...the Sherman Antitrust Act, anti-dumping provisions in the WTO, and likely future court rulings and legislation that might result from that sort of behaviour (especially from the EU and Asian countries that are slowly growing more hostile to Microsoft).

It is one thing to offer your your software for free as has been done with IE since the start. Even when Microsoft moved IE from the "Plus! Pack" onto the Windows install CD when they supplanted Win95 with Win95A there was not much to complain about. MS' practices became questionable by the time Win98 came out, when IE became a required part of the OS install and applications started coming out with IE dependencies as this put competitors at a disadvantage. I say questionable because even after a decade it is still a point of debate if such practices should be regulated.

With Windows Server, IIS is right on the OS install CD and is increasingly integrated with the OS and other server software (SQL reporting services, sharepoint, team foundation server, etc). This is reaching the point of being questionable behaviour, however I think the competition has accepted that MS has decided such things as web browsers and HTTP servers are "components" of desktop and server OSes respectively--and it is a bit difficult to complain about it when Linux distributions almost universally bundle such applications with their OS installs too.

as they've shown in the past, they're not at all averse to taking large financial hits to ruin a competitor

Absolutely. However, selling at a loss or giving software away for free (as in beer) is one thing. Bribing your competitor's customers to switch, especially when your competitor is non-commercial, is not only ethically and morally unacceptable to most people--it is almost always illegal too. The most definite line that would be crossed is going from discounts, to give-aways, to actually offering money or gifts to potential customers. At my place of employment, it is made very clear to everyone that exchanging anything but the most nominal gift with potential customers--even if it doesn't involve luring them from a competitor--is an offence punishable by immediate dismissal even on the first offence.

Sure, until your PHB strolls in and declares that "we're switching to Microsoft!".

I feel fortunate that the economic climate where I'm at right now is a job-hunter's market and a person can be selective. Even if it weren't, however, if *my* PHB were to just stroll in and pronounce that we were making major, disruptive IT infrastructure changes without previous consultation with others just because some salesbot from MS offered him some swag then I'd immedately set about updating my resume and finding work elsewhere. Not only do I not like at a job where the opinions and concerns of employees are not considered--it has also been my experience that organisations with managers that "stroll in and declare" such things are destined to fail if they do not change. This goes both ways, by the way--I think that it would be equally as bad if the PHB at an all-MS shop were to stroll in and declare "we are switching to Linux" without any apparent good reason.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.

Build a better mouse trap . . .and the world will ignore you.

Market an inferior mouse trap and get rich.

Ever notice that car companies tout the fact that their product is the number one seller in something or other? Why do they do that when what someone else buys doesn't actually have anything to do with my taste and needs?

Because it works. The great masses are herd animals. They instinctively incline to doing what they see others doing. This is an overall positive virtue in a tribe seeking tribal survival. It is also extremely easy to exploit.

Back in the day sysadmins were taken largely from the highly educated, highly cynical, highly independent portion of the population, motivated by their own drummer, the computers themselves. Nowadays most of them are just typical examples of herd members who got into computers because that's what they saw everyone else doing; and, of course, that's "where the money was."

They can be led. And if they can't be led, they can be ordered.

KFG

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

If this is what Microsoft is doing (and IMO I suspect it is) this smells of once again abusing their monopoly in OS to extend their control of new markets at the expense of fair competition.

Going into a business and offering to help convert to IIS isn't abusing its OS monopoly. They don't have anywhere near a monopoly on server OSs anyway. But of course I agree Microsoft is using its financial power and businesses shouldn't be quick to oblige.

Doesn't seem to matter much if it's true, the current administration (in general) has shown little interest or appetite in reining Microsoft in.

In fact one of the very first things Bush did when he entered the White House was remove all of the DOJ lawyers on the Microsoft monopoly case who had any legal experience with monopolies. Young lawyers replaced those already working on the case. And the expert independant counsil was fired without any explanation. Bush intentionally sabotaged the case against Microsoft.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

In fact one of the very first things Bush did when he entered the White House was remove all of the DOJ lawyers on the Microsoft monopoly case who had any legal experience with monopolies.

Could you please provide a link to this information? I was unable to find any.

Google is your friend. [justfuckinggoogleit.com]

Especially this article from the first page of results: Slap on the wrist? [salon.com] (Salon.com)

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

Uhh...you don't run your own business. You work for Microsoft (at least, according to your blog). Don't astroturf; it's unprofessional.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

April 8, 2006:

Yesterday, I went to start my new job at Microsoft. I arrived just after 9:30 and informed the receptionist I had arrived and needed to be escorted into the building. I filled out my parking form, and went to wait. This began the....

https://www.darklock.com/blog/?p=74 [darklock.com]

All you have to do is *read* the blog, just read.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

If you don't have the time to check your facts, you shouldn't be saying that another guy is wrong.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

So tell me again how I should have stuck it out and gone down with the company. I go around talking principles and freedom, I go broke. I stick the word "Microsoft" on my marketing materials, and I make money. Go ahead. Argue with that. Tell me how I should have been happy to lose my house, my car, every dime of my savings, and all the other crap I would have lost riding the open source handbasket.

I left a high paying Microsoft-related job for a low paying open source job. And I'm much happier now. You obviously invested all of your time and money in the wrong market. Don't blame your own failure on open source. That's childish.

Screw you people, I know who butters my bread.

You don't butter your own bread? You apparently don't own your own company for the pleasure of being independant. And if you think you must work with Microsoft to make a living then you're very ignorant.

Just look at the graph

Microsoft's share was closer to Apache's in March of 2002 than it is now. There's no reason to believe it won't plateau or drop off again. There's not even a trend yet (like there was back then) that can lend itself to predictions.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

For the most part, the general Internet hosting market is pretty much the worthless segement of the market. Yes, this is an area where Apache/LAMP dominates, but mainly only because it's cheap for ISPs to offer the services and there's a ton of pre-cooked forum/ecomm/blog packages out there.

When you get into custom developed sites, there's a few things to note -- (A) A large percentage run behind firewalls and will never be counted by Netcraft. (B) People tend to use Java or .NET much more often than Perl or PHP. (C) IIS is very very common on the Intranet, even for Java stuff.

The truth is nobody cares what GoDaddy uses to park domains. Maybe it's a technical test of IIS in some fashion, but is it really worth it for Microsoft to convert sites that aren't doing anything? Windows/IIS will never compete in the $20/month free PHP package market, so it's not really worth bothering about.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

Windows/IIS will never compete in the $20/month free PHP package market, so it's not really worth bothering about.

That might have been true a few years ago but not now. Have a look at the Windows (and Linux) offerings, including SQL Server, at JodoHost [jodohost.com]. I'm not connected with them other than as a happy customer. There are plenty of bad Windows hosting companies out there but there are also good ones with prices pretty much the same as LAMP.

I've done a few spare time projects for non-profits. Previously my only realistic choice for these was PHP / MySQL mostly because of hosting and tool costs but my latest project uses .NET / C# / SQL Server. With low cost IIS hosting, versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server that are either free or low cost, the features of ASP.NET 2 and DotNetNuke [dotnetnuke.com], I probably won't be returning to LAMP any time soon.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

Apache is easy to use. There are a billion and one admins who know how to configure it. It's fast, extensible, and runs on Windows to boot. Why the hell would you want to run IIS if you're already running Apache? I have worked extensively in the hosting industry, and let me say that customers on IIS + ASP have many, many more problems than those running on an Apache + PHP/Perl based system.

In a web server environment, Windows costs more than Linux, period. Administration is more complex, downtime is more frequent (Windows requires you to reboot for a large number of security fixes,) site intrusions more destructive and harder to remove, and Windows Server 2003 gets very expensive in a server farm. Web hosting is a bottom dollar business; companies are trying to reduce IT costs, not raise them.

Windows is well suited for many environments. Web hosting is not one of them.

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

Where I've worked in the past, it seems that the Web Server of choice follows the Application Server of choice.
If management find a great application that cheaper to run, and maybe has a great support contract at a low price, they buy into the idea, and don't really bother about the fact that they have to move the front end web server technology from say IIS to Apache.
I've been in a situation when a brilliant Apache / Java / Broadvision combination, was replaced by an IIS / .Net solution, just because of what seemed "a good deal" at the time.
However in my particular situation, us "Sys Admins" loved apache so much, we decided to leave it in at the front end, to serve media, protect the front end and internal-proxy the IIS data, and then have IIS as the middle layer just doing the .Net integration part and processing data.
So at the end of the day, Netcraft reports apache, but the real grunt of the work is being done by IIS.

Mike

Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important

At the last place I worked at IBM did the same thing. They wanted us off LAMP and offered to give us 1-year Websphere and DB2 licenses (something like $10,000 per year afterwards!) and they would even re-write all of our web applications at no charge.

So as I'm in the meeting with these guys all I hear them talk about is their technology. Java this and Java that, scalability, DB2, XML addons, etc. It was all very impressive until I asked them a question for which they had no answer.

What business problem does our current technology fail to solve that your new technology can?

The fact is they had no idea. They didn't care at all about our business, only their technology. Our LAMP system already did what we wanted and I communicated to IBM that our business success had nothing to do with technology, but everything to do with the business model behind it. I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft isn't solving any business problems by converting anyone to IIS.

Fishy...

Stumbled across this tidbit from a NewsForge article [newsforge.com] on the Go Daddy move:

The approximately 4.5 million domains that moved are, after all, inactive parked domains -- meaning few people are pointing their browsers at them. As for domains that actually do get Web traffic, plenty of those still remain on Linux at GoDaddy.com, something Microsoft failed to mention in its press release [microsoft.com] last month touting the domain transfer.

So, it appears that IIS is the webserver of choice for websites that don't actually need to be viewed. Hmm...

Also from the NewsForge article:

The obvious question is, did Microsoft pay Go Daddy or offer any incentive to move its parked domains to Windows? Adelman declined to clear up that issue one way or the other. "We can't discuss the technical aspects of our industry relationships."

That sounds an awful lot like a 'yes' to me...sure, I can't prove it, but if Microsoft didn't pay or offer incentives, I don't think Adelman would have had any trouble making that known.

So, basically, it looks like Microsoft paid Go Daddy to switch to IIS for their domains, the vast majority of which were parked anyway, in a rather transparent attempt to massage the numbers. Quelle suprise.

Re:Fishy...

Yes it is interesting. Why would you pay for a system that just parks domains? These are static pages that don't carry much traffic. I have to wonder just how many copies of IIS are running to serve those parked domains? Five maybe?
As everybody with a brain will say, so what? For Microsoft to win this one big they need to get everyone to move to .net and asp. With Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Python being so popular that one may be hard sell.

Wait for it....

Yes, Netcraft has confirmed that Apache is now dead. Thank you.

GO SOFTWARE! Woo!

Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache's marketshare is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment.

Thank God. Why does it seem like if your favorite server software lost too much market share to Microsoft, you would pretty much be emasculated? Do geeks latch on to software like jocks latch on to sports teams, or what? No matter what is said, it always has to be punctuated by "but my team is the best." Sometimes OSSers have more in common with Christian Evangelicals and cheeseheads than geeks...

Re:GO SOFTWARE! Woo!

For people like myself that work in web dev, this isn't religion. Its practical. Most of us have to work on what our employers work on. More gains for IIS mean more chances we have to work with it. If you have experience with apache IIS is like stabbing yourself in the head. If you want any extra features you often have to buy them, everything is managed through the clicky interface from hell and ISAPI hurts my brain. I'm sure that IIS is perfectly capable, but I just don't like it. So when I hear more people are switching it fills me with dread.

Re:GO SOFTWARE! Woo!

Do geeks latch on to software like jocks latch on to sports teams, or what? No matter what is said, it always has to be punctuated by "but my team is the best."

Do you really need to ask this question? Of course geeks do that. Unless they aren't computer geeks. Star Trek geeks battle over favorite episodes or captains, RPG geeks can't suffer a criticism of "their" game system, and I'm sure some Paleontologists geeks get their knickers in a twist when someone disses their favorite dinosaur, "Tarbosaurus could totally kick Dryptosaurus' ass!" "Could not!" "Could so!"

Sometimes OSSers have more in common with Christian Evangelicals and cheeseheads than geeks...

This is a human thing, most everyone is fundamentalist about something, and most people identify more with a particular group than they do with humanity as a whole. Should geeks be above this kind of thing? Maybe, but very few people have the emotional and moral intelligence to rise above their upbringing.

What good is that?!

Oooohhhkay.

So, after much years of expensive research dollars, Microsoft IE server has FINALLY become a highly optimized and finely honed webserver that serves just a single static page?

Most lopsided lie (um,,, I meant statistic) I've ever seen.

Let's get real

These numbers are meaningless.

What possible difference could it make to me whether godaddy parks domains with IIS or apache? If godaddy's choice moves the stats in a significant way, then the stats aren't meaningful.

Let me give it a go

user@internet:~$ sudo apachectl start
Password:
Starting httpd:

OK, try it now.

Apache vs. Linux

The metrics from Netcraft are hard to read with respect to OS. They don't publish a free OS graph that I've found, and you can't assume that any particular percentage of Apache hosts are running on any particular OS.

All this tells you is that the majority of "sites" (that being a nebulous term) are using Apache on some OS as at least their front-line Web servers. They might still be back-ending to whatever, and that would not show up.

Personally, I don't think you can use Netcraft for any purpose other than to say "IIS and Apache are the most popular Web servers."

This doesn't follow my experience

I can't fathom why large hosting providers would switch unless something is happening under the radar. Even then, I've managed both Apache and IIS. IIS by far requires more of a hands on approach and Apache is far more versatile in what exactly you can do with it.

I've rolled my own self-healing scripts that manage my Apache servers and warn me if something is amiss. Our IIS servers can be a pain at times...

Why are blog hosts counted individually?

*.blogspot.com should be counted as together, same with typepad.com. With all of the spam blogs created to boost google rankings, these should be counted collectively so as to err on the side of caution.

Who cares?

Seriously. Who cares about parked domains and what they are on. Parked domains are nothing more than a PR tool. A parked domain coudl be served from a dead simple serve-only-the-parked-page custom binary/script. Anybody relying or relishing how many domains are parked on their software has issues. Particularly since it wouldn't take much for a registrar to "park" a very high number of domains on whatever combo they wished. About the only interesting stat in the Netcraft report is that a little more than half of all "domains" are "parked". Half the domains on the web are nothing more than "for sale" signs by domain name speculators and entities who couldn't buy real webspace.

For those who actually care or might need to know which software serves up the most active domains, a report on just those is more beneficial.

Even then, why does anyone care how many domains are on what software? After all, a domain could be served up by multiple machines running different OS/Software combinations. So those numbers wouldn't be accurate either. Further, for those who may need to know "what server is best" these numbers only add confusion due to irrelevance. If you are setting up a truly large site, you'd better already know your stuff and don't need this kind of 'data'. The only data of this type that would be useful to you would be what the really busy sites run. Even then it also depends on active vs. dynamic.

As far as hostnames running a given OS, this too is not valuable due to key factor assumptions. The assumption underlying this statistic is that more is better. This is beyond mere OS capability. All hosts are not equal. A Linux box running a website(s) on 400MHz Pentium is not comparable to a Windows box on say a DL580, or vica versa. Regardless of OS in this case the DL580 will be capable of serving "more" of whatever it is serving.

The Netcraft web server report is a curious statistic and should be taken as nothing more.

Confess to anything

"If you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything."

I don't know who said this originally, but it's a great comment.

Stupid Slashdroids

Unless you live under a rock you should know that Windows server sales are higher volume than Linux servers (source [eweek.com]). Since many of the Windows servers are used internally one could say IIS has been traditionally under-represented in the Netcraft survey.

Now they win over a domain parking service and everyone want to say the statistics are unfairly in their favor? What about all the years those statistics worked against them, I didn't see you complaining then.

I like to work with Apache, but 2k3 server is a large improvement from MS. If MS finally getting their act together on the server front means they win back some of the "Netcraft share" than great.

In other news...

...GoDaddy's revenues fell markedly as people found they could easily break in and setup their own sites at the parked domains without having to pay for them.

Apache down??

Great, first Black Hawk and now Apache :((