Mike McCarron 5/26/2011 Web Server Trending and History A web server refers to either the hardware or software

that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through an internet connection. Common uses of web servers is to host web sites, data storage and running enterprise applications. The earliest web server I remember ever working with was Microsofts IIS server. That was back in 1998. Later in my life I started working with what was at the time a rising star on the server market, Apache, circa 2003. This dynamic of open source versus closed source (Apache vs. IIS) is one of the interesting factors in market share. Market share is:

Market share, in strategic management and marketing is, according to Carlton O'Neal, the percentage or proportion of the total available market ormarket segment that is being serviced by a company. It can be expressed as a company's sales revenue (from that market) divided by the total sales revenue available in that market. It can also be expressed as a company's unit sales volume (in a market) divided by the total volume of units sold in that market. It is generally necessary to commission market research (generally desk/secondary research) to determine. Sometimes, though, one can use primary research to estimate the total market size and a company's market share. (Market Share, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share, accessed 5/26/2011) IIS once had a dominant position in the market but just as other Microsoft technologies are declining as other start-up technologies takeover market share from them, IIS is losing market share. Others that were also rising previously are almost gone like Sun. We can see this in this diagram:

(May 2011 Web Surver Survey, http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/05/02/may-2011-web-serversurvey.html#more-4490, accessed 5/26/2011)

Some new entries and rapidly rising stars are the Google server and the nginx server. Which can be seen in this table: Developer April 2011 Percent May 2011 Percent Change Apache 58,382,787 55.12% 61,961,645 57.52% 2.40 Microsoft 16,333,388 15.42% 16,598,468 15.41% -0.01 Google 11,892,939 11.23% 12,651,775 11.75% 0.52 nginx 9,192,405 8.68% 9,499,307 8.82% 0.14 lighttpd 660,001 0.62% 678,076 0.63% 0.01 (May 2011 Web Surver Survey, http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/05/02/may-2011-web-serversurvey.html#more-4490, accessed 5/26/2011)

Bibliography:

Wikipedia, Market Share, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share, accessed 5/26/2011 Netcast, May 2011 Web Surver Survey, http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/05/02/may-2011-webserver-survey.html#more-4490, accessed 5/26/2011