IMO, this boils down to 2 things:
1. nginx, particularly, does a LOT of promoting, marketing, PR, etc...
We don't. They get to promote their FUD all the time and remain
pretty much unchallenged.
2. They don't seem to have issues in understanding that new features,
enhancements and improvements to the server is what keeps users
and grows community. Instead, we either spend our time naval
gazing and pondering such inane issues as revisiting versioning,
or else treat the codebase like a school exercise where the
winner is the one who changes the most number of lines. Each time
a new feature is proposed, we have to deal with the incessant
blather around 2.6, 3.0, EOLing 2.4, blah blah blah. We've had
some features in httpd long before similar functionality existed
in nginx, for example, but they got to release 1st because we
were too busy standing on soapboxes or bike-shedding.
Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
(I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
w/ the blog posts or instead of it.
And finally, when the vast majority of web servers nowadays live
*behind* proxy servers, these type of metric surveys are meaningless.
Of course, I feel that this was nginx and MS' plan all along: they
knew how things were changing and wanted to win the "proxy server
market"... all that should be pretty obvious w/ 20/20 hindsight.
> On Apr 18, 2018, at 12:29 PM, William A Rowe Jr <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation
> oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache
> HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software."
>
> How long will that last claim remain true?
>
> We can sum up the state of affairs from four well-respected web server
> popularity reports from three sources;
>
> https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/03/27/march-2018-web-server-survey.html
> (Based on 214M hostnames / 7M IP's)
>
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/201803/index.html
> (Based on 63M hostnames)
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201803/httpbyip.html
> (Based on 5M IP's)
>
> https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all
> (Based on Alexa-ranked top ~10M primary domains)
>
> Notably, we now hold the minority-majority position across the "web
> server" space, discounting the fact that "unknown/other" would
> probably still land us at 50% using really simple stats, for some few
> more months. Still, there is an unarguable downward trend of adoption
> and relevance of Apache httpd.
>
> Depending on which survey you examine, either IIS or ngnix has caught
> up rapidly; the disagreement between surveys is often laughable. While
> IP's themselves might make for a better mapping, these are equally
> 'virtual' and don't represent machines either. Mass hosting, by name
> or number, is easily observed in these reports with huge swings from
> month to month. Reports which don't feature as much swing have
> apparently factored out much of the duplicated noise/domain camping.
>
> As as been restated over and over, http:// is effectively DOA, long
> live https:// (h2, etc). Brings us to the point that we have not been
> the most popular HTTP/TLS server for over two years, and you can
> surmise what this will do over time to the numbers offered above;
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/201803/index.html
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/201803/servers.html
>
> Many will always carry a deep fondness or appreciation for Apache
> httpd; how much traffic it actually carries in future years is another
> question entirely, and has everything to do with the questions we
> should have solved some time ago, and aught to solve now. Better late
> than never.
