News
IIS Gains in Monthly Netcraft Survey
- By Scott Bekker
- 04/04/2002
Microsoft Corp.'s IIS Web server gained almost 2 million sites in March, taking market share from the open-source Apache and the iPlanet Web servers, according to
Netcraft.
Microsoft had hovered at a 28 percent to 29 percent share of the market for months, while Apache enjoyed about double that share. The March shakeup pushes Microsoft share all the way to 34 percent and drops Apache to around 54 percent. iPlanet, meanwhile, slipped below the psychological threshold of 1 million sites in March -- down to less than 890,000 from about 1.1 million the previous month. Apache accounts for about 20.5 million sites, while IIS has nearly 13 million sites.
Netcraft's monthly Web server survey attributes Microsoft's gain to register.com and Network Solutions migrating their "domain parking facilities" to Windows.
Network Solutions has been progressively moving sites from a Solaris Netscape-Enterprise (iPlanet) system at Digex to a Windows-based system at Interland. The move of several hundred thousand Network Solutions sites from Digex accounts for most of the iPlanet drop in March.
Although an expected drop in IIS sites due to Microsoft's significant security problems with the Web server in the last year never materialized, Netscape noted a press report that many of the Network Solutions sites were hacked a few days after moving to Interland's IIS-based operation.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.