Chris Neppes, over at Port80 Software, sent me a heads up on their monthly survey of what web server software the top 1,000 corporations use.
They’re promoting the survey in response to some gloating by the Apache folks about their 63.98% share in the August 2003 Netcraft Survey.
Port80 looked at the response headers from the home pages of the top 1,000 companies. They found that 53.6% of them ran on some version of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.
What Are We Counting?
So who is right: Netcraft or Port80? I’ll say neither of them are.
Port80’s correct when they point out that a large number of Apache sites are on shared servers and may be parked, or abandoned domain names. It’s an Apache feature that it’s so easy to use the Virtual Host directive to support hundreds of domains on one server. So the Netcraft survey is flawed in that they don’t distinguish between the importance of amazon.com v. whump.com. Both sites have equal weight in the survey.
However, the 53.6% IIS share of major corporate web sites does not correspond to dominance either. The Port80 survey looks at the parent corporation home site, which may not be the main destination site for that firm’s customers. Or it may be a corporation without a major internet presence that maintains a site for communication with shareholders and the press. So there’s the weighting problem again: cdw.com v. warnco.com. Both run IIS 6.0, but cdw.com is a heavy traffic commerce site and warnco.com redirects to irpage.com
Traffic and Weight
Looking at traffic gets us towards the goal of determining which server platform ‘dominates.’
Nielsen’s site has the top ten destinations by home and business users aggregated to parent company. Again, this is flawed data, as we lose the detail of what application/property people use.
Microsoft, TimeWarner (AOL Server), Yahoo, and Google (Google Web Server) are in the top ten.
Microsoft leads both the home and business use lists, probably by virtue of hotmail.com (IIS 5.0). But how much of that work is done on IIS and how much is still on FreeBSD?
Conclusion
Port80’s right to point out the flaw in interpreting the Netcraft Survey as indicating Apache’s absolute dominance. But they cannot conclude that IIS is the dominant server by looking at raw numbers of the top corporate home pages.
A rigorous analysis must take into account traffic going to every host and what’s running on each host. I’m sure that Nielsen would love to sell you that information if you have means to pay for it.
Aside
Everyone, when you send out numbers or pointers to white papers, please don’t use HTML email. That sets off my “it’s spam” assumption.
