Hello Trevor,
Thursday, November 18, 2004, 4:55:50 PM, you wrote:
GT> Roughly 1/3 of the web servers on the internet these days run IIS GT> Roughly 2/3 run Apache in some fashion
I know you said roughly, but it's less than 1/3 running IIS, quite a bit less infact. The latest Nov. 2004 Netstat survey puts it at well under a quarter (21.25% to be exact) with Apache at 67.77%
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/11/01/november_2004_web_server_survey.html
What's more, the IIS figure is down from a high of 35% in 2002 and is continuing to shrink. Apache is continuing to grow. There are reasons for this...
GT> Roughly 40-50% of the Apache guys were running PHP as their GT> primary scripting language (at least for web authoring).
Ok, for the sake of argument let's assume it's 40%. I don't believe for a second it is that high, but anyway.. that would be approx. 15.2 million sites running PHP.
There's a Netcraft survey based graph at php.net that shows about 17 million PHP-powered sites. And we don't need to make assumptions about ASP either: PHP overtook classic in 2002 and ASP.Net powers fewer than 3 million sites.
[snip]
GT> ASP and ASP.NET are free, just like PHP.. If you already run MS GT> servers. The good development tools might be another story,
That's a four-figure if, though, in practice. Not much in the budget for most serious sites or hosting infrastructures, but still needs to be factored in. It's a few missing features on any ASP site with a fixed budget, compared to the equivalent Open Source OS/Apache alternative.
Development tools? OK, but you can develop on any platform and there are some great free tools. Oh, you want to use MS? Let me take that back. Want to make sense of the logs? That's more spondulicks. What's your database backend going to be? And so on.
It's the total cost of ownership though.
And this includes the use of extensions to the languages. PHP extensions are free, ASP ones invariably cost. This has implications for the future of any project as well as the starting point: extending an ASP site could cost...well, it's impossible to know right now. Depends what direction we need to take in the future. But PHP extensions will be free. Then there are the license terms which in the case of ASP extensions are, er... we don't know yet. Depends on the extension.
Bit of a no-brainer, really.
GT> but if you have Windows XP (Pro I believe), then you have IIS and GT> can run ASP and maybe ASP.NET. If you have Windows 95 or Windows GT> 98, you have Personal Web Server which will do ASP.
Hell of a waste of perfectly good hardware, though. If you want to run a web server, Linux or FreeBSD will run rings round any of the above. You do need a MS server OS for reasonable performance and security if you want to go the MS route.
MS is great for some things. And there are things only MS can do (COM objects spring to mind). But in the main, it's a bad choice for hosting. I haven't even mentioned security - take a look at the server uptime charts sometime. That's almost entirely a function of security. It's great to be able to set up a FreeBSD server (the top 50 are almost always all *BSD) and leave it running/earning for three years without even a reboot. That's why the figures are as they are.
Regards,
Peter.
--
the circle squared
network systems and software
http://www.circlesquared.com
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