Microsoft notched up another 3% gain in the most recent Netcraft Web server survey. The open source Apache server, the long-time leader, surrendered some ground to Microsoft but still retains a significant lead at 57.6%, down 2% from last month and down another 3% from July 2000. The Netcraft survey includes results for July 2002 from more than 32 million Web sites.
Microsoft enjoys 31.8% market share against 28.9% the previous month.
Netcraft attributes a significant portion of the 3% growth experienced by Microsoft to domain registrar Register.com installing a Windows-based front-end on its domain parking system. The company has changed its underlying server a number of times in the last year and Netcraft notes that "this causes a fluctuation of around 3% in the top line figures when it changes".
One of the trends highlighted by Netcraft is the relatively slow uptake of the Apache 2.0 Web server. More sites are upgrading to Apache 1.3.26, released a month ago, than to Apache 2.0 released in April this year.
Netcraft reports that less than 50 000 Web sites are running Apache 2.0, while more than 10 million have upgraded to 1.3.26. "One reason for the limited deployment of Apache 2.0 may be the lack of support for some of the more popular modules when the server was first released," reports Netcraft.
According to the survey, more than 20 million of the surveyed sites are running some form of Apache software. Microsoft servers, such as IIS, serve up more than 10 million site pages while the Zeus server (0.75 million) and Sun`s iPlanet (0.49 million) share the rest of the pie.
Another trend highlighted by Netcraft is the continuing relative decline in percentage terms of .com registered sites. "The percentage of the Internet`s sites that are registered in .com has fallen below 50% for the first time. Over the last six years, the proportion of the survey based under .com has fallen slowly, but reasonably steadily from around two-thirds in 1996 to less than half now, as registration in country-specific TLDs has become more straightforward, and the speculative registration of .com domains has unwound," says Netcraft.
In a related development, and one that may add to the Apache popularity, is the Covalent announcement of support for ASP.Net through Apache/2.0 running on Windows.
The number of sites running Apache on Windows is small, and most developers writing .Net applications will use IIS servers. With the Covalent announcement, there is a chance that more developers will move to the Apache platform because of the many security issues experienced on the Microsoft platform.
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