IIS Rising

Version 6 of IIS is both the culmination of a long history of development for the product and an important new beginning from the standpoint of performance, reliability, and security. It’s worthwhile to take a few moments to review the history of IIS and how it has evolved over the last six years. That’s right, six versions of the product in six years, a new version each year. That’s a hectic pace for an upgrade cycle from the enterprise point of view, and in fact many industry pundits have taken Microsoft to task for this, saying things like, “Why couldn’t Microsoft have gotten it right in the first place?” and “Why release versions of the product that were inferior, lacked security, and had performance and scalability problems?” On the other hand, you can only admire a company that turns itself completely around and hits the ground running.

Perhaps the corporate world has been the world’s biggest beta testing environment for IIS, and perhaps, as such, it has complained bitterly about holes and leaks being discovered almost daily and about the steady stream of fixes and patches coming out of Redmond. But the corporate world has nevertheless embraced IIS with enthusiasm, as various statistics demonstrate:

• Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) has maintained statistics on websites connected to the Internet since August 1995. While Apache continues to be the dominant platform used with a 56.5 percent share of hosted sites as of February 2002, growth in market share for this platform has flattened out in the last two years and may even be starting to decrease. Meanwhile, after flattening for several years, market share for IIS has been increasing in the last year and stands at a 30.25 percent market share at the time of this writing. The results of the Netcraft survey are well known in the Internet community (especially among Apache enthusiasts!) but a lesser known fact is that Netcraft also conducts surveys of web server platforms used for secure e-commerce, and in this area IIS excels. For example, a January 2001 survey of over 100,000 web servers using SSL indicated that almost half (48.76 percent) of these sites ran on IIS, while only 28.21 percent employed Apache and 6.79 percent used Netscape/iPlanet. The Netcraft statistics, when considered overall, say clearly that while Apache is still favored for simple web hosting purposes, IIS is popular for web applications and particularly for hosting e-commerce sites.

• ENT Magazine (www.entmag.com) surveyed the sites of Fortune 500 companies in July 2000 and found that IIS was the most popular platform used with a 41 percent market share. Sun-Netscape Alliance’s iPlanet server came in second with a 35 percent share, while Apache came in third with only a 15 percent share. Large companies like Compaq, Ford Motor Company, Phillip Morris, and many others use IIS exclusively as their web server platform, primarily because using IIS simplifies the process of developing large-scale web applications.