IIS Takes Market Share from Apache Says Netcraft

Published: April 19, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft's Web server took some market share from Apache over the last month, according to Netcraft, which tracks Web server usage and other statistics related to the World Wide Web.

Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), the non-intuitive name of its HTTP server, gained 4.7 percent of Web server market share, compared to a loss of 5.9 percent for Apache, according to Netcraft's Web server survey for April. The gains gave IIS about 25 percent of the market, while Apache's share dropped to about 62 percent. Apache and IIS are--and have been for some time--the two most popular HTTP servers on the Web, although more than twice as many Web sites are run on Apache as IIS, Netcraft statistics show.

Netcraft attributes this month's change to Go Daddy, a domain registrar which recently migrated more than 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Go Daddy had been the world's largest Linux host, but is now the world's largest Windows Server 2003 host, as measured by hostnames, Netcraft says.

The open source community isn't taking this affront by IIS lying down. "It's time for the Free Software/Open Source community to fight back," says Bruce Perens, who created the OpenSourceParking.com project in response to IIS' market share gains. The project's goals, according to Netcraft, are to increase the market share for open source software and generate revenue from advertising on the parked domains, which will be used to fund "political and promotional efforts" on behalf of open source software.