Apache in front in Top 100 Sites

While the statistics from Netcraft lean to demonstrate an ever-decreasing gap between Apache and IIS deployments across the Web, a report posted this week to the Royal Pingdom blog of uptime monitoring service Pingdom shows Apache remain far in advance of Microsoft’s Web server among the 100 most popular sites on the Web.

While Netcraft’s data include Web servers for all the measurable sites on the Internet, Pingdom says it used Alexa.com to categorize the 100 most popular sites on the Web, and compared platforms among just those sites.

The outcome, says Pingdom, was a substantial lead for Apache, the diverse versions of which are in use at 49 of the top 100 sites, compared to 20 for IIS. Lighthttpd, which has taken a prominent share of open-source server deployments in the more common results, was restricted to four among these narrower results.

Pingdom points out that only one of the top 100 sites is using the newly launched IIS7, saying “it’s also interesting to note that only one out of the top 100 websites is running the much-touted IIS 7, and that is Microsoft.com,” although it may not be that unexpected that the Web’s largest sites are not racing to deploy server platforms as they hit the .

In Netcaft’s most up to date Web Server Survey, Apache had about 50 percent of the market compared to IIS’s rougly 35 percent.