Share via

Huge growth in Microsoft’s market share for web servers!

  • Article

Millions of people out there are using IIS to host their websites, but we all know it’s not the only product on the market. For many years, Apache was leading with a significant margin, but things are finally starting to change.

According to NetCraft, a research company from the UK which specializes in analyzing the web and hosting market, IIS has had a huge spike in market share recently. According to the report they released a few days ago, IIS had almost 50 million new sites during February, increasing it’s market share by 19%.

This is great news because it’s not only a large increase by itself, but also means that 32.8% of the websites in the world are running on Microsoft servers. This bring IIS close to a nose-to-nose with Apache (at 38% market share).

According to our own survey, IIS 7.5 is the most popular version, running on about 60% of the IIS Servers on the public internet. Neither this or NetCraft’s data include internal servers, such as those running SharePoint inside the corporate network of many companies, so the actual percentage is probably even higher.

The full details of the NetCraft survey: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/03/february-2014-web-server-survey.html

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2014
    OK sure, microsoft servers are ahead of unix based machines on the internet? Right, the world would not trust an ms server if you paid it all of bill gate's money. They are just not reliable enough. Word.
  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2014
    Did you know there are unix machines in the world that have not needed a reboot in over 20 years. Yeah that is the truth. MS boxes are slow as a dog and tied up with so much nonsense, that unless the real world has lost it's mind, this data is seriously flawed
  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2014
    My company was literally paid by Microsoft to switch to Windows to host our >10k parked domains recently.

    "Neither this or NetCraft’s data include internal servers, such as those running SharePoint inside the corporate network of many companies, so the actual percentage is probably even higher."

    Nor does it include the 1000's of Apache/nginx in server farms behind a reverse proxy.

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2014
    Hmmm.
    Followed the url, and while MS has made a major, major gain here (and hats off to them, that's a lot of new sites under their banner) the "active sites" graph shows a slight loss; Not sure why this is (Netcraft themselves attribute it to the fact that almost all the gains are down to Nobis tech switching to iis, and given Novbis' largest provision is teamspeak servers - which are pretty much the same site stamped once per team - maybe that is why we are seeing no real gain in the active field). Still, nice to see Apache's reign threatened at last :)
  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2014
    Ben, I've never put much stock in this, as any mom and pop company with $50 and a grandchild who can write brochureware, will host on apache. It's not interesting. I don't care about how many snow-plow businesses are trying to get away with the cheapest hoster.

    I am also interested in php on apache versus asp.net on IIS. I'd like to see comparisons of ROI between those solutions.

    I am more interested in something like http://www.port80software.com/surveys/top1000webservers/, which answers the question.... if cost didn't come into play... what is used?

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2014
    Well that was shortlived
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2015
    It's funny because the personal site of Erez is running Apache on a Unix machine.
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2015
    The comment has been removed