March 19, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- While the numbers from Netcraft (netcraft.com) tend to show an ever-decreasing gap between Apache and IIS deployments across the Web, a report posted this week to the Royal Pingdom blog of uptime monitoring service Pingdom (pingdom.com) shows Apache still far ahead of Microsoft's Web server among the 100 most popular sites on the Web.
While Netcraft's data include Web servers for all the detectable sites on the Internet, Pingdom says it used Alexa.com to identify the 100 most popular sites on the Web, and compared platforms among just those sites.
The result, says Pingdom, was a considerable lead for Apache, the various versions of which are in use at 49 of the top 100 sites, compared to 20 for IIS. Lighthttpd, which has taken a notable share of open-source server deployments in the more general results, was limited to four among these narrower results.
Pingdom points out that only one of the top 100 sites is using the recently-launched IIS7, saying "it's also interesting to note that only one out of the top 100 websites is running the much-touted IIS 7, and that is Microsoft.com," though it may not be that surprising that the Web's largest sites are not racing to deploy server platforms as they hit the shelves (except Microsoft, which has to be running IIS7 for fairly obvious reasons).
In Netcaft's most recent Web Server Survey, Apache had about 50 percent of the market compared to IIS's rougly 35 percent.
