Tech Center Current

Several technology news sites have written about a recent survey from Netcraft which, at first glance, appears to show that Apache has suddenly lost a lot of market share in the webserver market. However, the change in numbers actually has more to do with how Google is reporting their server usage than people switching webservers.

A webserver is the software that delivers webpages to your browser. Every website is running some sort of webserver. The open source Apache server is, and has for over 10 years been, the most widely used webserver on the Internet, currently used on about 50% of all websites. The runner-up is Microsoft’s IIS, used on about 35% of all websites (it should be noted that last year Microsoft negotiated with the popular Internet registrar GoDaddy to use IIS on all of its parked [placeholder] domains, within a couple months causing an estimated 10-percentage-point bump in IIS market share numbers).

According to Netcraft’s data, some big changes appeared to happen this year. Apache market share suddenly dropped about 10 percentage points (on top of the 10 percentage points it lost in the GoDaddy deal the previous year). Because IIS’s market share also showed a slight increase on top of the GoDaddy bump, several news sites began reporting that websites are massively switching from Apache to IIS.

Upon further inspection, though, this is not the case. The largest factor in the recent change was something Google did. Google has historically used a custom version of Linux and either a built-from-scratch webserver or a custom version of Apache for most of their core services. This year, they modified several of their servers so that they call themselves “Google Front End” (GFE) instead of Apache. On Netcraft’s graphs, you can see the result of this change by the purple line that suddenly jumped up in May 2007, at the same time the Apache numbers appeared to fall. This wasn’t the result of massive server migrations across the Web, it was mostly a name change by Google. Another factor was some migrations elsewhere to lighttpd, another open source webserver designed to be more efficient and less robust than Apache.

For the curious, here are the highest-traffic websites on the Internet, according to Netcraft, and the primary operating systems and webservers they use:

IIS servers above are highlighted in dark blue for clarity. Every operating system listed above is a Unix-based system except for Windows (although it is not listed, Mac OS X is also Unix-based). Country-specific domains were skipped to avoid redundancy.