Windows web server market share grows

Netcraft reports that Windows/IIS has a growing share of the web server market:

Microsoft-IIS gains 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month’s survey, Microsoft’s share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache’s advantage to 27.7%.

Netcraft counts sites, which means that its monthly figures are hugely influenced by the actions of a few big players in the web hosting market; many “sites” are no more than parked domains. It’s also worth noting that the total number of sites is constantly increasing. Apache probably has more users than ever before, despite the above “decline”. Other web servers have a miniscule market share.

Even with these caveats, it seems that Microsoft is at least holding its own in the web server market. My hunch is that this has to do with the high quality of ASP.NET, and the fact that Windows Server 2003 has won a decent reputation for security as a web server. I am not saying it is more secure than say Linux-Apache; just that security isn’t the deal-breaker that it tends to be on the desktop.

Congratulations to Scott Guthrie and his team.

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3 thoughts on “Windows web server market share grows”

  1. I have not look at it extensively, but it would appear that the methodology used by netcraft [to decide what an active site is], throws away most sites sharing the same IP, and compares the rest via a hash of the html tag structure…

  2. > i think this is because the blog giants are adding millions of web sites per month

    It’s possible; I agree it would help to have a fuller breakdown of the figures.

    Tim

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