What is the most reliable and popular web server (hardware and software)?
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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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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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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
MySpace runs on IIS[^]. Is that big enough for you?
The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader | Twitter
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MySpace runs on IIS[^]. Is that big enough for you?
The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader | Twitter
heh, geniuses think alike and all that ;)
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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heh, geniuses think alike and all that ;)
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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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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
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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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! :)
I think you just called us both stupid. Doh!
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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MySpace runs on IIS[^]. Is that big enough for you?
The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader | Twitter
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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...)
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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I think you just called us both stupid. Doh!
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
Well, these things are all relative you know... ;-)
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Well, these things are all relative you know... ;-)
Paul, meet brick. Brick, meet Paul. You are relatives.
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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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
See my reply here: http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=2809445#xx2809445xx[^]
John
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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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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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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.
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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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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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
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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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
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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"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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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
Like someone else said, it boils down to what language/technology you want to use. If you already know C# or VB.NET, you might be geared toward using the Windows, IIS, and ASP.NET trio--with SQL Server as your database. If you prefer to go the open source-esque route, then you might want to go with the Linux, Apache, and PHP trio (or rather more commonly referred to as LAMP--Linux, Apache, MySql database, and PHP). Those are the 2 most commonly used platforms, as evidenced by pretty much every hosting company's packages. You're able to however mix and mach a little--i.e. run PHP on IIS and even ASP.NET on a Linux box (using Mono I believe) but you're better off using the more common approaches explained, since they were kind of built to fit easily with each other. Popularity: I will say that the LAMP platform is more widespread because of 2 main reasons--it came before ASP.NET, and it's cheaper for hosters because of the open source software. Reliability: This totally depends on how well the coder writes the code. It's tremendously easy to write bad code in both.