Get APLawrence.com by RSS2003/12/18 apache
The Apache web server. Named from its early history as a series of patches to be applied to the NCSA httpd server - it was a "patchy" server.
The main competitor to Apache is Microsoft's IIS and the rivalry is fierce - how many sites are running each is constantly monitored and the interpretation of the results is fought over : http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3074841
There are other web servers, but the percentages are miniscule.
Although its roots are in Unix, Apache has been ported to Windows.
An interesting comment from the Netcraft page (November 2003)
During 2001 and the first half of 2002 several companies hosting very large numbers of hostnames including Webjump, Namezero, Homestead, register.com and Network Solutions migrated to Microsoft-IIS. Subsequently these businesses have either failed, significantly changed their business model, or reverted to their previous platform, and Microsoft-IIS share is now in line with its long term pre-summer 2001 level of around 20%.
Microsoft isn't going to just shrug their shoulders and give up, of course. They want IIS to be dominant, or at least more popular than it is now, so it's unlikely we've seen the end of this battle.
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"The main competitor to Apache is Microsoft's IIS and the rivalry is fierce - how many sites are running each is constantly monitored and the interpretation of the results is fought over..."
The one stat that cannot be "fought over" is the number of sites running each package. The folks who are charged with hosting websites have made it quite clear whose software they prefer.
Something that the article's author was careful to side-step was the effect the underlying operating system has on the HTTP server package. Neither IIS or Apache operates in a vacuum, so direct comparisons are meaningless unless run on the same OS. I suspect Apache on Windows would not do as well as it would on UNIX or Linux. And therein is the fallacy of trying to compare IIS with Apache.
With IIS, you have one OS choice, and that is Windows. We all know how stable and reliable that OS is, especially under heavy load. With Apache, you have several OS choices, Windows only being one of them. Call me a UNIX elitest or wiennie or whatever, but I fail to see how any rational webmaster would want to expose his site to all of those little nasties that seem to constantly pop up in the Windows envronment. At least on UNIX, if any security issues pop up they are most likely configuration issues and can be fixed. With Windows, who knows for sure?
BTW, I can personally vouch for the stability of Apache on OSR5: my website is run in that environment, as are the websites of several of my clients. I can't say anything specific about performance because none of these sites get hammered for pages.
--BigDumbDinosaur
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