Thanks Adrian. It has been a very mixed month for Microsoft. Although the top line figures appear to present steady growth in adoption of Microsoft-IIS, this masks some significant events.
The impact of Code Red has resulted in around 150,000 Microsoft-IIS sites on 80,000 ip addresses disappearing from the internet, one of the most visible proponents of Microsoft technology for mass hosting has closed down, and Gartner Group has issued a strongly worded advisory, recommending that people presently running Microsoft-IIS should replace it as quickly as possible.
On the plus side, receipt of a site list from homestead.com which has over a million small sites based on NT, has more than offset the losses from Webjump, and from the empirical evidence to date it appears that people are not yet inclined to act on Gartner's advice.
Microsoft Windows has a significantly higher share of the web when one counts by computer, rather than by host, as in the conventional Web Server Survey. The survey shows 49.6% of the computers running the web are Windows based. As some of the 3% of computers not identified by the Netcraft operating system detector will in reality be Windows systems, despite some uncertainty due to the survey's error margins, it would be fair to say half of public Web Servers world-wide are run on Microsoft operating systems. Although Apache runs more sites than Windows, Apache is heavily deployed at hosting companies and ISPs who strive to run as many sites as possible on a single computer to save costs. Windows is most popular with end-user and self hosted sites, where the host to computer ratio is much smaller.
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