Microsoft Grows by 2.6 Million Websites in Ju

Microsoft is literally breathing down Apache's neck. The Redmond company is on an excellent ascendant trend with its web server business, increasing its market share month after month. The Redmond company's climb started strong back in 2005-2006 from the position of the underdog. Approximately two years ago Microsoft's slice of the web server market was six times smaller than Apache's. Continually gaining ground, Microsoft is now challenging Apache's leadership position.

"In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge
Apache's leadership position," revealed Netcraft in its monthly survey for web server market share.

Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS are all on the increase. And by the current market tendencies, Netcraft approximates that Microsoft will catch up with Apache sometime in 2008. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft's success can be actually measured by the performances of the Windows Server 2003 operating system and IIS7. In this context, Microsoft can only grow as the company is scheduled to make available Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 at the end of February 2008.

"The open source Apache has been the leading web server software since the March 1996 Netcraft Web Server Survey. In November 2005, Apache was found on 71 percent of web sites, putting it more than 50 percentage points ahead of Microsoft IIS (20.2 percent). At the time, Apache's market share advantage seemed insurmountable. But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent," Netcraft added.

All this is good news for Microsoft but bad for apache and perhaps us also as Microsoft tries to take on with its aim of running Monoply in everything..

I wouldnt be surprised if we have Microsoft fresh milk in a few days

Well to me apache rules! Microsoft's web server is for n00bs and besides why pay when you can get one for free?

Quite a point there..Endurer

Well the one of the main reasons why Microsoft Server is doing better is because they have done 'partnership' deals with universities around the globe. Microsoft Server has been made a compulsory module in most of the Network Administration courses and then of course, there is that if-you-pay-for-something-its-got-to-be-good factor.

Its much like Oracle VS MySQL. Both offer high-end services, one has to be paid for and the other is free and open-source. To be honest, I think there will be a big bang soon in the Open Source industry, because Google is really interested in it.

As for the stats, I really don't believe them because firstly, people like me (and I have 6 sites running) did not post their 'votes', just to look at a handful of people and come up with a 'market-leadership' report gives me an impression, the site where you got the update from is just trying to get some extra traffic. Nothing more!

Or could be the link baiting factor lol