The market share of the Apache Group’s eponymous freeware web server continues to hold firm against its commercial rivals, Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp. It even increased its share of the market over the last month, if the latest figures from Netcraft can be taken as a guide. Overall, Apache, now on version 1.3.1, was running on 50.35% of servers polled, a 0.66% rise on July; Microsoft was at 22.69% and Netscape at 8.22%. To put this in perspective, a year ago the figures were 43%, 18% and 12% respectively. Netcraft, a Bath, UK-based consultancy, conducts its monthly surveys by collecting as many host names providing http services as it can, and then polls each one with an http request to get the name of the server. This time, it got responses from 2.81 million web sites. In terms of the actual server – rather than vendor – Apache had the same figure, as it only has one server, then 22.39% were running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), 4.88% Netscape Enterprise server, Rapidsite accounted for 2.3%. However, Rapidsite is a virtual hosting service that runs a customized version of Apache on SGI Irix, so that’s almost more share for Apache – and NCSA, which was top of the tree in Netcraft’s first survey exactly three years ago with 57%, now has just 2.28%. More fun with numbers can be had at http://www.netcraft.com/survey
