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Netcraft recently released their October statistics and the results are startling. Apache now has less then a 10% lead on Microsoft’s IIS — the smallest gap between the two since IIS was launched in 1996! From my personal experience, I was always under the impression that Apache was the dominant platform for serving content on the internet. Microsoft’s IIS similarly to it’s operating system, was always plagued by security and instability problems . It’s one thing to get a blue-screen on your personal computer, but imagine getting one on a server hosting millions of websites?

Never the less, Microsoft has apparently been able to not only reverse the market share loss, but attain a huge gain over the last few months. To me this seems to be the result the new Vista roll out and a greater focus on security. Poking around the new IIS I also noticed the integrated features and improved focus on web 2.0. In fact, it seemed extremly easy to setup a blog service and other social network applications with the new version.

A quick check on server statistics accross the ‘net confirmed my view: The majority of blog’s and web 2.0 sites now run IIS! Based on the way things are going, Microsoft’s IIS is set to become the dominant technology for serving content on the internet within 6-12months. Sounds far fetched? Check out the netcraft chart below:

Apache — 68,155,320 — 47.73%
Microsoft — 53,017,735 — 37.13%
Google — 7,763,516 — 5.44%
Sun — 2,262,019 — 1.58%
lighttpd — 1,541,779 — 1.08%