The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting space.
My suggestion with removing the shared hosting accounts was just a way to remove noise from the dataset so we are truly comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges... Otherwise you could end up seeing IIS loose in a market space that it never was in (and never will be in) because Apache gained in it.
It was just a suggestion. You could leave shared hosting in.
The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using
IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting
space
That's not from a lack of trying on Microsoft's part.
And eliminating shared-hosting from a statistic like this is exactly how Microsoft would do it - introducing bias to turn the numbers in their favor.
Does EC2 count as shared hosting btw? What about Heroku?
to remove noise from the dataset
Sure, I'm all for removing parked domains. But there are lots of business and professionals that have their website hosted with shared accounts, websites that are useful for their target audience, even though they may not be in the TOP-whatever. Excluding those websites from such a metric would do a disservice to people.
Otherwise you could end up seeing IIS loose in a
market space that it never was in
Or you could say that you would see IIS win in a market space that's getting crushed by shared hosting.
It's a comparison of popularity between similar front-end web servers, which does have something to say about cost and feasibility of hosting multiple websites on top of cheap servers. Otherwise the comparison is useless, as popularity doesn't really matter to big corporations and startups that know what they are doing and are likely to choose Nginx anyway.
On GoDaddy Windows/IIS hosting starts at $4.99, and Microsoft is known to cut deals with such providers. I also remember a talk from MIX in which a microsofty said Microsoft is working with hosting providers to give devs an alternative just as cheap as EC2 Linux instances.
You can get cheap IIS hosting and cheap hosting with ASP.NET. Microsoft also has a web edition of SQL Server which is licensed at a reasonable rate for people who want to use it on a dedi/vhost or in shared hosting.
If you like IIS & SQL Server in shared hosting it's a reasonable option.
Frankly, more people like PHP + MySQL. If you like Windows you can run that on Windows but people and hosting providers.tend to like Unix more.
The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting space.
The purpose of collecting these stats is not to find out how IIS is doing in it's target market, but instead to find out how popular web servers are.
If I were to suggest removing all non-Free OSs from the statistics (since one could claim that as a Free web server Apache doesn't compete there), then you'd see totally different numbers aswell, and that would just as deceptive.
No, no-one suggesting removing non-free OSs. However the grandparent post suggested removing shared hosting, since IIS doesn't compete there. This would fudge the stats in IIS's favour, in the same way that removing non-Free OSs would fudge the stats in Apache's favour.
It's not cherry picking because the original title of this post suggested that IIS had lost marketshare to IIS and returned to it's 1998 levels. My comment pointed out that this is not true because Apache gains are not IIS losses 1-for-1.
IIS lost marketshare to Apache (and to nginx and Google) and returned to 1998 levels. That has nothing to do with Apache gaining all of IIS losses. Anyway, Apache is growing fast at about the same click IIS is shrinking.
It's an apples to apples comparison of "what hosting software is used across all domains", not "what hosting software is used across all domains in the space Microsoft competes for".
That may not be a particularly useful metric in business terms, but it is at least a fair comparison.
People create these stats for a reason. If the reason is to show that one side or the other is "losing", whatever that means, they should go ahead and chose whatever they want. (I am not implying that's what you were saying or anything).
On the other hand, if the point is to educate people on which software is more used in a meaningful sense, the article would be better if it had the grandparent's explanation at the top, explaining why the comparison should be done only in one specific market, and then do the comparison in that market. I for one wouldn't have thought about it, and gotten the wrong impression.
