Early this year, after years of steady climbing, Apache's share of the Web server market, according to Netcraft, peaked. Through the second half of 1999, its shares slipped. So did Microsoft IIS; but as the end of the year came around, Microsoft suddenly surged up and Apache began to reciprocate in the downward direction.
But that was for just one month. Since the first of the Millennium, Apache has been steadily going up to record shares, and IIS has mostly gone down, relatively speaking (though in absolute numbers it has been going up). In April, Apache tallied 8,812,96 Web servers for a 1.48% increase to 61.53%. Microsoft was second with 1,047,890 servers and a .16 percent increase to 21.09% of the total. Third was iPlanet, the family of Sun Solaris and Netscape servers sold by Sun. iPlanet servers may trail the leaders, but not among the top traffic sites. "The Solaris/Netscape combination does particularly well amongst high transaction SSL sites such the leading retail brokerages, Charles Schwab, Etrade, and Fidelity," Netcraft says.
