# Nginx to pass Microsoft in server market share



## drhowarddrfine (Jan 3, 2012)

Apache has long been the leader by far in number of servers it resides on for the internet while Microsoft's IIS has held the number 2 position. However, that percentage lead has dropped below its lowest point since 2000 while nginx is rising to meet it.

From Netcraft:


> Although Microsoft gained 1.8M sites it recorded a further drop in market share, extending a trend that dates back as far as June 2010. Conversely, nginx was the only major web server vendor to gain market share this month and set a new all-time high of 9.63%. Furthermore, it saw the second largest absolute growth with an addition of 6.9M hostnames.
> 
> In terms of Active Sites, nginx gained 1.9M which resulted in it overtaking Microsoft to have the second largest number of Active Sites (22.2M). Apache experienced the greatest rise this month with an addition of 3.7M Active Sites, more than double the increase it recorded last month.


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## vand777 (Jan 4, 2012)

I see the only reason to use Win + IIS: to host Asp.Net, MVC and WCF applications. You can do it on FreeBSD + Mono + Nginx (or Apache) but theoretically speaking the native Windows environment might be better (faster?) for such applications than that based on Mono. 

P.S. However, I haven't tested the performance differences. Just my thoughts. Might be wrong.


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## fonz (Jan 4, 2012)

vand777 said:
			
		

> I see the only reason to use Win + IIS: to host Asp.Net, MVC and WCF applications. You can do it on FreeBSD + Mono + Nginx (or Apache) but theoretically speaking the native Windows environment might be better (faster?) for such applications than that based on Mono.
> 
> P.S. However, I haven't tested the performance differences. Just my thoughts. Might be wrong.


You're probably right: .NET is still a Microsoft thing and Mono is nothing more than a well-intentioned best-effort attempt to port it to other platforms, but when it started few people believed it would lead anywhere anyway and .NET still works best on Microsoft systems.

Which is of course exactly what Microsoft wants. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft (and the quality of their products), in the end it's still a business and their conduct is understandable from their point of view. The only thing we can do in the open-source community is trying to develop a better alternative. But that takes a lot of time and effort.

Having said all that, it's nice to see nginx gaining market share in the first place (I also use it instead of Apache) and it's even nicer to see that the brunt of their increase comes from IIS rather than Apache.

Fonz


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## vand777 (Jan 4, 2012)

fonz said:
			
		

> You're probably right: .NET is still a Microsoft thing and Mono is nothing more than a well-intentioned best-effort attempt to port it to other platforms, but when it started few people believed it would lead anywhere anyway and .NET still works best on Microsoft systems.
> 
> Which is of course exactly what Microsoft wants. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft (and the quality of their products), in the end it's still a business and their conduct is understandable from their point of view. The only thing we can do in the open-source community is trying to develop a better alternative. But that takes a lot of time and effort.



In my opinion, Mono team did a fantastic job! Well done! 

Re Microsoft, I do not like them for bugs, security holes and quality of their products but I'm very impressed how developer-friendly they are. Yes, all these new technologies (.Net, Asp.Net, MVC, WCF, WF etc) may not be impressive from performance point of view (at my company we still develop all performance critical applications in C++) but they make developers' life so easy and the development process so fast and pleasant. 

I think that this is one of their main achievements. But quality of their products kills all my developer's love to Miscrosoft  FreeBSD forever!



			
				fonz said:
			
		

> Having said all that, it's nice to see nginx gaining market share in the first place (I also use it instead of Apache) and it's even nicer to see that the brunt of their increase comes from IIS rather than Apache.



Agree 100%. I always use Nginx.


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