Web Server technology stack market shares?

Question

I'm investigating for a piece of front-end web technology which customers will install onto their own web servers. The server-side technology stack needs to support acting as a SOAP client, but not much else. My primary goal is ease of deployment.

• Ideally the customers wouldn't have to install any software, they could just drop in some files and go (hence I want to know about web server market share)

• If they did have to install any software, I'd like it to be as easy and painless as possible

At the moment it's a close race between ASP.NET and PHP. These are my experiences and thoughts thus far:

• PHP is available and likely installed on most linux or BSD web servers along with Apache, but not many IIS servers. It can be installed on pretty much anything, but it's not as easy to install on windows as ASP.NET. It looks like this is improving, however the improvements seem to be aimed at IIS7, not 6 or 5

• IIS6 seems to be the most widely used version of IIS right now

• People that run *nix web servers seem to be clued up enough to install/enable PHP if they need to... not so much for windows admins

• ASP.NET is available and likely installed on many windows web servers, and if it's not installed it's not hard to add.

• ASP.NET is pretty much not available for non-windows servers - although personally I think mono is great, I just couldn't sell it as a production solution (today) to most of the *nix server admins I've met

• Ruby/Python/Java all require lots of manual hacking to get running so I've more or less ruled them out.

• It looks like PHP has a greater market share overall, but there seem to be lots more windows/IIS servers within the corporate market (which is what this software is aimed at)

If anyone can point me in the direction of any statistics, or share their experiences regarding common web server setups, it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Great Statistics says that Apache currently (Oct 09) has just under 70% of websites run apache and just over 20% run IIS. Assuming you've got an app that every website in the world wants to run, PHP would be the best choice as enabling it on apache is pretty trivial.

However, if you have a particular market you're developing for, it may have a differnt usage profile. If you were to go down the php root, one option would be to package your application as part of a XAMPP install. XAMPP makes it easy to run Apahe/MySql/PHP/Python/Perl on a windows machine - you extract to a directory and run a single command to startup a preconfigured environment.

Using XAMPP would makes running apache on windows very easy for non technical users.

Answer 2

The server-side technology stack needs to support SOAP calls, but not much else. My primary goal is ease of deployment.

If this is your goal "Ease of Deployment", why don't you do both the ASP and PHP version?

Answer 3

What is the target market here? That is the segment where you need to figure out what people are running and/or are willing to run.

Also, if you want a purely cross-platform approach, you might want to consider Tomcat running java--it runs on anything and everything.

Answer 4

It seems like if you choose PHP, everyone can use it, and it's just a bit more difficult (not very) for MS people.

However, if you choose ASP.net, it will be a bit easier for MS people, but most *nix people either can't, or won't use it.

Given the choice of small pain to MS users or big pain to *nix users, I would give the small pain to MS users.

Overall, PHP sounds like the way to go, but I guess that's pretty subjective, as I personally limit my MS exposure to my workstation.

Answer 5

I've just installed IIS and PHP on a virtualized XP Pro using latest Web Platform Installer 2.0 and it's a simple point-and-click. The very same installer that will let you have IIS7 on Win2008 had no trouble setting up the highest version of IIS that can run on Xp (5.1) and adding PHP to it, it just asked for the SP3 and the XP install CD in the process.