News

Netcraft: IIS Presence Increased in July

• By Scott Bekker
• 08/07/2001

The documented gains come as many critics suggest that Microsoft's software practices have some culpability in the recent proliferation of the Code Red worm, and that Microsoft's customers will turn away from its Internet Information Services Web server in disgusted droves.

The Code Red Worm, which exploits problems in Microsoft's Index Server, uses a vulnerability that Microsoft publicly patched a month before the outbreak. However, some critics argue Microsoft's tendency to install little used features by default leaves administrators vulnerable to problems through features they would never use.

Netcraft's July survey would have been conducted too early to reflect any fallout from the Code Red Worm.

Microsoft's market share across all domains rose nearly 5.5 percentage points from June 2001 to July 2001 to nearly 26 percent, Netcraft found in its survey of more than 31 million sites.

Apache fell almost 4.3 percentage points to about 59 percent, retaining a significant lead in market share. IPlanet, the Sun-Netscape alliance, also dropped 1.85 percentage points to a 4.3 percent share.

In an analysis of the shift, Netcraft found Microsoft's gain to be primarily the result of two large U.S.-based installations converting from Sun Microsystems's Solaris operating system: Namezero and Network Solutions. "These large installations had previously been masking a general decline in Solaris share on the web, which is now down four percentage points over the last year," Netcraft found.

Meanwhile, Netcraft also found between 600 and 700 sites running Windows .NET Server and Internet Information Services 6.0 in several countries. The server went into Beta 2 testing this spring.