The January 2001 Netcraft Web Server Survey is out: Apache slips, IIS gains

The January 2001 Netcraft Web Server Survey is out;

      http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ Microsoft-IIS had its first big rise in almost a year, gaining 1.8-percent of the web. ... Also making notable progress is the scripting language PHP.

Top Developers

                                                             
         Developer December 2000  Percent January 2001  Percent Change         
         Apache          15414726   60.04      16207982   58.75  -1.29         
         Microsoft        5027023   19.58       5903512   21.40   1.82         
         iPlanet          1722228    6.71       1772154    6.42  -0.29         

Top Servers

                                                                
           Server        December 2000 Percent January 2001 Percent Change     
     Apache                   15414726   60.04     16207982   58.75  -1.29     
     Microsoft-IIS             5025017   19.57      5901507   21.39   1.82     
     Netscape-Enterprise       1682737    6.55      1733097    6.28  -0.27     
     WebLogic                   890791    3.47      1004571    3.64   0.17     
     Zeus                       676526    2.63       693684    2.51  -0.12     
     Rapidsite                  365807    1.42       371441    1.35  -0.07     
     thttpd                     321944    1.25       343172    1.24  -0.01     
     tigershark                 139300    0.54       150937    0.55   0.01     
     AOLserver                  125513    0.49       127980    0.46  -0.03     
     WebSitePro                 110681    0.43       113480    0.41  -0.02   

Around the Net

Microsoft-IIS had its first big rise in almost a year, gaining 1.8% of the web. Around 600,000 of these sites are on [1]Digital Island's network. The relatively static market share for Microsoft on the web as a whole contrasts sharply with its progress in our companion [2]SSL Server Survey where Microsoft makes consistent and relentless gains, month after month, and now accounts for 49% of the sites performing encrypted transactions on the internet.

Arguably, Microsoft's applications have made the difference, with there being no straightforward alternative to Microsoft's Commerce Server in the Unix world. [3]Intershop has been the most likely alternative, particularly in Europe, but the company's financial [4]performance has suggested that market share has been bought rather than earned.

Also making notable progress is the scripting language [5]PHP. Earlier this month [6]Zend announced the availability of the first commercial products to support use of PHP, including significant performance improvements through script caching. The PHP module is compiled into the Apache server on over 5 million web sites, or approaching a third of all Apache sites. Although PHP will only be in use on a fraction of these sites currently, it is regarded as easier to program than perl or jsp, and has created a broad developer community in a relatively short space of time. PHP, together with MySQL and Apache, has become the de facto way of developing web applications in the Linux environment, in a similar way to the IIS/ASP/SQL-Server combination in the Microsoft world.