Report: Microsoft Threatening Apache's Market Lead In Web Server Market

According to the survey by Netcraft which includes responses from over 975,262,468 sites, Microsoft is threatening the position of Apache as the top web server. Microsoft gained about 9 million additional sites this month, increasing its market share by a further 0.37 percentage points. So, Apache still leads with 37.6% of all sites, while Microsoft is now just 4.1 percentage points behind. If the trend continues, Microsoft may become the No.1 in the web server market in the coming months.

Nearly seven million of this month’s new websites are using Microsoft IIS. Around 11 thousand of these new sites are hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform (including a few phishing sites), helping to maintain Microsoft’s position as the largest Windows hosting company in terms on web-facing computers. Most of the new IIS sites at Azure are hosted in the US, with more than a third of the total being hosted in the North Central US Azure region alone.

Notably, www.apachelounge.com is one of this month’s websites which appears to have switched to Microsoft IIS. The Apache Lounge is a web forum primarily focused on running Apache in Windows environments, and has provided Windows Apache binaries for more than 10 years. The site understandably has a long history of being hosted from an Apache web server, most recently on a Windows Server 2008 platform, but is now using Microsoft IIS 8.5 on Windows Server 2012.

All may not be as it seems, however, as the web server is still sending an X-Powered-By: Apache/2.4.9 (Win64) header. The web server is also reporting X-Powered-By: ARR/2.5, indicating the use of IIS’s load-balancing features. It is likely that Apache Lounge is powered by multiple Apache instances which are hidden behind a Microsoft IIS load balancer.

Read full report from the link below.

Source: Netcraft