At this point it almost goes without saying that the predominant Web server is Apache, which has had the top market share across all domains since early 1996, holding at better than 60% for the last year -- according according to Netcraft, which has been studying the matter since September 1995. Back then the top server by a huge margin was NCSA's, which flatlined at approximately zero in 1999.
Apache is still doing fine, but it dropped by 1.29% in January of this year, Netcraft reports. Microsoft's IIS gained 1.82%, and Sun's iPlanet, the third place server, dropped .29%. Both Apache and Microsoft gained in absolute numbers. Netcraft found 16,207,982 domains served by Apache and 5,903,512 served by Microsoft. But there were other developments behind those details. Netcraft reports, "The relatively static market share for Microsoft on the web as a whole contrasts sharply with its progress in our companion SSL Server Survey where Microsoft makes consistent and relentless gains, month after month, and now accounts for 49% of the sites performing encrypted transactions on the internet. Arguably, Microsoft's applications have made the difference, with there being no straightforward alternative to Microsoft's Commerce Server in the Unix world."
Netcraft also reported that PHP is being adopted at an extremely rapid pace: "The PHP module is compiled into the Apache server on over 5 million web sites, or approaching 40% of all Apache sites. Although PHP will only be in use on a fraction of these sites currently, it is regarded as easier to program than perl or jsp, and has created a broad developer community in a relatively short space of time. PHP, together with MySQL and Apache, has become the de facto way of developing web applications in the Linux environment, in a similar way to the IIS/ASP/SQL-Server combination in the Microsoft world."
The Netcraft survey can be found at www.netcraft.com/survey/.
- Doc Searls