The Battle over Web Server Market Share

The Internet-tracking organization Netcraft set off some alarm claxons over in Bruce Perens' neighborhood. Netcraft calculates, among many other stats, web server market share. Last month, Microsoft's IIS gained 5% of share (to 25% against Apache's 62%), but Perens fears it was through nefarious means.

Domain name registrar GoDaddy is used by many resellers. And it switched its domain parking systems from Apache to IIS, resulting in the market share changes. Speculation abounds that GoDaddy was "incented" by Microsoft to switch the domain-name parking lot to IIS.

Parked sites don't possess content or applications, so switching these domains is only a marketing tactic. It isn't as if these domains represent real market-share. Perens, though, has an open-source solution...

Technocrat: OpenSourceParking.com