Categories: Geek

All your web server statistics are belong to us

Nearly two-thirds of your base are belong to Apache

While doing some research in my capacity as Tucows’ TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator, a cool mish-mash of developer relations, Open Source Nerd Wrangler and playing the part of “The Cheat” to Ross Rader’s “Strong Bad”), I hit the Netcraft site to see how the server market was divided.

The latest Netcraft Web Server Survey — the August 2003 edition, which marks the 8th anniversary of the survey — says that Apache HTTP Server has its biggest share of the market ever, with 63.98% of the nearly 43 million servers surveyed. That’s about 27.4 million servers.

(For comparison’s sake, the first Netcraft survey back in August 1995 found less than 20,000 sites. That’s three freakin’ orders of magnitude’s difference in less than a decade.)

Apache is really “moving zig”!

According to Netcraft, Apache has a bigger than two-to-one lead over Microsoft’s server offerings — they have 23.75% of the servers, or 10.2 million servers. When counting Microsoft servers, Netcraft lumps all the various flavours of IIS (Internet Information Services) and PWS (Personal Web Server) together. This is a 2.2% drop in IIS’ market share that is attributed to Network Solutions’ migrating the rest of their domain parking system back to Solaris from a Windows based system hosted at Interland.

No! Over half your base are belong to Microsoft!

I mentioned this to Boss Ross (who reports to Boss’ Boss Noss):

Me: Hey, Ross. Seen the latest Netcraft survey? Apache has its biggest-ever share of the server market.

Ross: So who did Microsoft take their bigger share from?

Me: Bigger share? They lost almost a million servers from their July numbers!

Ross: Check out Scoble’s blog. He said IIS is on the upswing.

I hit the Scobleizer, and sure enough, he links to a guy quoting the Port80 survey of the top 1000 corporations’ web servers. According to that survey, IIS has the lead, with 53% of the share, easily trouncing Netscape at 18.6% and Apache at 16%.

“You have no chance to survive, Apache, make your time.”

So who’s right?

Probably both.

The Netcraft survey is Internet-wide, which accounts for anyone running a server, which ranges from my neighbour Hector all the way to Amazon, while the Port80 survey is restricted to Fortune 1000 companies.

In other words, if you limit your scope to the suits, all your base are belong to Microsoft. However, if you expand your scope to include the suits and everyone else, including Google, the Internet Archive, a zillion blogs, hosting services, DNS, and anything else that doesn’t wear a tie and say stuff like “That’s not on my action item list!” and “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes!”, things are quite different.

Suddenly I’m reminded of Danny O’Brien’s recent remarks:

Also the Microsoft stuff continues to have its head stuck right up the ass of corporate America. One of my big bones with MS stuff is that it always makes me feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm. All of their software is designed to help busy executives plan their lives. Everyone I know uses it to try and write birthday cards and chat with their friends. When people use Microsoft Office they use it anywhere but in an office. Microsoft knows this – but it also knows that the money comes from their corporate clients, so there’s a limit to how much it can bend its software toward a wider customer base. Ultimately when you use MS software, you’re not the end user MS perceives at all: we’re just living off the scraps Microsoft leaves out after feeding its big customers.

Yes, Microsoft has its games division, but I get the feeling that games are for the gaps in the borth-school-work-death cycle of good little consumers.

Where’s the software that lets you create — and no, I don’t just mean slideshows covering your ass for last quarter’s losses? I don’t think it’s coming from them.

And speaking of cubicle farms, I have a TPS report to file. Later!