Very interesting thread on Digg this morning called "Apache at 56% – what is wrong?" Apparently a number of factors are converging to erode the dominance of the Apache web server (which, as of two years ago, used to run 70% of web sites by some measures). Lots of interesting pro-IIS and .NET comments in the comments (the most vocal Unix/LAMP proponents seem to be embarrassingly out of date on the state of comparable Microsoft products — blinded, no doubt, by their rabid reaction to Microsoft businesses practices in the 1990s).
Several people pointed out that IIS today is very secure, performs well and is easier to configure (and the upcoming IIS7 adds a number of compelling features that bring it closer to feature parity with Apache). In discussions like this somebody always brings up the "free beer" argument (that Apache costs $0), but they neglect to mention that you can get the web server edition of Windows for just $300 now, and IIS/.NET is a more productive stack for developers by far. (I could easily burn more than $300 worth of time getting Apache configuration figured out.)
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I admin both Apache and IIS. I don’t have a lot to say about the general controversy– both servers have their strengths and weaknesses.
The $0/$300 argument only holds if you use a free database as part of your Windows stack– which I suppose is plausible– you could use MySQL or Jet– although most developers who do .net end up coding against SQL server, which adds a chunk of change to your deployment cost.
I’m not a .net programmer (although my experiences with Microsoft APIs make it hard for me to believe that .NET is “more productive” than PHP, Perl, or Python) so I can’t speak to that part of the stack. But, I will say that I’ve definitely burned lots of time dealing with problems on IIS that are extremely simple to deal with on Apache.
My top peeves with IIS are lack of built-in URL rewriting, lack of built-in handling for http authentication via anything other than Windows accounts, and lack of dynamically configurable virtual hosting along the lines of Apache’s mod_vhost_alias. (Yes, third parties address all of these issues, and .net applications can have URL rewriting, but at the server level there’s no solid feature for any of this).
On the other hand, Windows Web Server Edition along with DFS and NLB has made IIS my top pick for a low-cost clustered setup. Too bad writing admin scripts for this setup requires coding against the aforementioned Microsoft APIs– I do it, but I don’t like it.
I use Windows Server, .NET and MySQL for Approver.com and it works great.
URL rewriting and a lot of that other stuff are in IIS7.