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  3. What is the most reliable and popular web server (hardware and software)?

What is the most reliable and popular web server (hardware and software)?

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  • T Tomz_KV

    I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?

    TOMZ_KV

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    Paul Watson
    wrote on last edited by
    #34

    More how you use it that matters. There are some awful Apache powered sites and some great IIS powered sites (and vice versa.) Other factors are more important (licensing, administration, deployment, support costs, skills, resources, architecture, load-balancers, DNS, firewalls, CDN, client-side performance etc.) If you really want an answer then; You are on a Microsoft website which says to me you are a .NET coder which says to me go with IIS. I choose LAMP though as that is where my skills are. Actually more LAMR (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Ruby on Rails) than LAMP but LAMR sounds... well... lame.

    cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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    • P Paul Watson

      More how you use it that matters. There are some awful Apache powered sites and some great IIS powered sites (and vice versa.) Other factors are more important (licensing, administration, deployment, support costs, skills, resources, architecture, load-balancers, DNS, firewalls, CDN, client-side performance etc.) If you really want an answer then; You are on a Microsoft website which says to me you are a .NET coder which says to me go with IIS. I choose LAMP though as that is where my skills are. Actually more LAMR (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Ruby on Rails) than LAMP but LAMR sounds... well... lame.

      cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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      Tomz_KV
      wrote on last edited by
      #35

      Nicely summarized, Paul! :)

      TOMZ_KV

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      • T Tomz_KV

        I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?

        TOMZ_KV

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        Miszou
        wrote on last edited by
        #36

        MySpace runs on IIS[^]. Is that big enough for you?

        The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader | Twitter

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        • T Tomz_KV

          Nicely summarized, Paul! :)

          TOMZ_KV

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          Paul Watson
          wrote on last edited by
          #37

          BTW if anyone tells you IIS is not good for big sites; MySpace. You might not like MySpace but they do massive load* and it is all .NET and IIS. They gave a talk at Mix'06 and the primary issues were the same issues LAMP users face; software and hardware architecture. * Still way more than Facebook. Don't let Facebok fanboys mix you up, MySpace kicks their arse in every area including making money. OK, OK, except growth. Facebook has better growth but it will top-out just like MySpace has. And they still won't be making any money.

          cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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          • M Miszou

            MySpace runs on IIS[^]. Is that big enough for you?

            The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader | Twitter

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            Paul Watson
            wrote on last edited by
            #38

            heh, geniuses think alike and all that ;)

            cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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            • P Paul Watson

              heh, geniuses think alike and all that ;)

              cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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              NeverHeardOfMe
              wrote on last edited by
              #39

              I would have thought that one of the defining qualities of a genius is that s/he *doesn't* think like anyone else! baa-aah! :)

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              • N Nemanja Trifunovic

                John M. Drescher wrote:

                microsoft.com ran on apache just 2 years ago.

                It did not. For protection of dns attacks, it was using services of akamai, which runs on linux, but microsoft.com was always on Windows/IIS

                Programming Blog utf8-cpp

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                ResidentGeek
                wrote on last edited by
                #40

                I can vouch for this answer as someone who knew the site first-hand not-so-long-ago. Microsoft.com has run on Windows Server/IIS since at least 1999 (the point at which I became personally knowledgeable about it). I presume it did before that, as well.

                Caffeine - it's what's for breakfast! (and lunch, and dinner, and...)

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                • N NeverHeardOfMe

                  I would have thought that one of the defining qualities of a genius is that s/he *doesn't* think like anyone else! baa-aah! :)

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                  Paul Watson
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #41

                  I think you just called us both stupid. Doh!

                  cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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                  • M Miszou

                    MySpace runs on IIS[^]. Is that big enough for you?

                    The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader | Twitter

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                    Tomz_KV
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #42

                    I remember that it started with Coldfussion. Parts of the site are still in Coldfusion right now. Do you think it will completely move to IIS?

                    TOMZ_KV

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                    • R ResidentGeek

                      I can vouch for this answer as someone who knew the site first-hand not-so-long-ago. Microsoft.com has run on Windows Server/IIS since at least 1999 (the point at which I became personally knowledgeable about it). I presume it did before that, as well.

                      Caffeine - it's what's for breakfast! (and lunch, and dinner, and...)

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                      John M Drescher
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #43

                      I believe I have figured that out. The webhosting company that microsoft used did use apache but to cache instead of host the IIS webpages. I can say it was very shocking to me to see apache timeout errors from time to time on a microsoft site. I have not seen these recently though, but I rarely go to microsoft.com anymore.

                      John

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                      • P Paul Watson

                        I think you just called us both stupid. Doh!

                        cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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                        NeverHeardOfMe
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #44

                        Well, these things are all relative you know... ;-)

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                        • N NeverHeardOfMe

                          Well, these things are all relative you know... ;-)

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                          Paul Watson
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #45

                          Paul, meet brick. Brick, meet Paul. You are relatives.

                          cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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                          • D Dan Neely

                            In addition to what Nemanja Trifunovic wrote, the only major MS site to run on an OSS platform was hotmail, which was written on a BSD platform and continued to be until a few years after MS bought the original creators out.

                            Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

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                            John M Drescher
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #46

                            See my reply here: http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=2809445#xx2809445xx[^]

                            John

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                            • D Dan Neely

                              Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:

                              Fortune 1000 companies never heard that, apparently[^]

                              Anyone have a more recent survey? That one stops in mid 07.

                              Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

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                              Lost User
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #47

                              dan neely wrote:

                              Anyone have a more recent survey? That one stops in mid 07.

                              Netcraft has been keeping track of market share since 1995. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html[^] Best Wishes, -David Delaune

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                              • T Tomz_KV

                                I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?

                                TOMZ_KV

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                                M Offline
                                Member 96
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #48

                                I often hear people say they believe in astrology...what's the difference what people often say here or anywhere else?


                                "It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson

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                                • P Paul Watson

                                  More how you use it that matters. There are some awful Apache powered sites and some great IIS powered sites (and vice versa.) Other factors are more important (licensing, administration, deployment, support costs, skills, resources, architecture, load-balancers, DNS, firewalls, CDN, client-side performance etc.) If you really want an answer then; You are on a Microsoft website which says to me you are a .NET coder which says to me go with IIS. I choose LAMP though as that is where my skills are. Actually more LAMR (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Ruby on Rails) than LAMP but LAMR sounds... well... lame.

                                  cheers, Paul M. Watson.

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                                  Dan Neely
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #49

                                  I choose lamp because I've never bothered with anything more sophisticated than a filedump and it's cheaper. If my ambitions ever go beyond setting up a photogallery at some point I'll probably get IIS, but since I haven't done so anytime in the last half dozenish years...

                                  Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

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                                  • T Tomz_KV

                                    I remember that it started with Coldfussion. Parts of the site are still in Coldfusion right now. Do you think it will completely move to IIS?

                                    TOMZ_KV

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                                    Rama Krishna Vavilala
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #50

                                    No everything is in IIS/ASP.NET. You may still finds urls ending with cfm. The cfm extension is mapped to ASP.NET handler so that people did not have to change their bookmarks.

                                    Proud to be a CPHog user

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                                    • T Tomz_KV

                                      I must have done something wrong. My servers never run over 6 months without a rebooting. iisreset is more frequent than I would like. Do most of your sites host interactive web database applications?

                                      TOMZ_KV

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                                      Doug Perreault
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #51

                                      We have over 400 websites running on an Windows 2003 / IIS 6 server with 90% of them connected to a SQL Server backend system. Some are smaller sites than others, but by and large they are probably typical websites for the typical small business. These are not e-commerce sites, per se, but they do use SQL for a lot of their content. We had minor problems before we upgraded our hardware, but the problems were caused by running out of disk space more than anything. A few years ago we had problems when we had our servers at a less than reliable data center whose power was not conditioned properly. But now that we have our servers in a stable environment with proper hardware (and by that, what we have isn't really all that much -- RAID 5, 2GB RAM and dual Xeon 2.4GHz CPU's), the system runs quite well. I don't believe that I have ever used IISReset personally. To tell you the truth, I don't know that I have ever even heard of it. But, do we have to reboot the server? Yeah. Just about every second Tuesday of every month -- i.e. on Patch Tuesdays. It's not rebooting to fix a problem but to reboot due to applying a security patch. Does that make it less reliable than Apache on Linux? I don't know. We run Apache on a Windows machine and it seems to be about the same reliability -- only needing rebooting on patch Tuesdays. But we don't have any Linux machines, so I can't give you a fair comparison there. And we only have one website running on Apache, so that's not a fair comparison either.

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                                      • D David Crow

                                        Tomz_KV wrote:

                                        What is reliable and popular one?

                                        Apache.

                                        "Love people and use things, not love things and use people." - Unknown

                                        "The brick walls are there for a reason...to stop the people who don't want it badly enough." - Randy Pausch

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                                        jtyost2
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #52

                                        WAMP for us. IIS with the PHP plugin was pretty unstable and not easy to work with for us. WAMP is a ton easier.

                                        -- jtyost2 http://jtyost2.wordpress.com

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                                        • D Dan Neely

                                          "What integer when divided by 2.5 and rounded up to the nearest integer results in 17?" :rolleyes:

                                          Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

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                                          Reelix
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #53

                                          42 (Sorry - I couldn't resist :p)

                                          -= Reelix =-

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