Web sites continue to be switched from Linux to Windows Server 2003 at about the same rate as in July, according to statistics compiled by Netcraft. The company said the number of active sites running on Windows Server 2003 had grown to about 185,000, an increase of 109 percent since July.
Linux Sites Continue Migration to Windows Server 2003
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This is probably the result of the mediahype. The Linuxhype has convinced a lot of companies that they offer something far better than everything else and when you go try it out it frankly isn’t that special and has a very high TCO since it’s costly to maintain.
Now people realize and they switch away from Linux… interesting indeed. I bet a lot more will go Solaris soon too…
Only 5% of those sites have switched from Linux! Negligible.
Hi,
Maybe web site developers are going back to Micro$oft because development tools are better eg Visual Studio, Cold Fusion?
Thats the only area where Microsoft beats Linux in my opinion.
*lol* you are a bit ambitious claiming 5% is negligble.
How bout you take a 5% pay cut and give the money to me, since its obviously so insignificant.
5% is 1 in 20, thats not a small number. Good thing you aren’t running a business, at least not one I’ve invested in anyway.
So 5% of new Win2K3 servers were formerly Linux servers…could we also get a statistics on how much of the new Linux servers out there were formerly Windows server? I’ll bet you it was more than 5%…
To all the spinmeisters out there: this statistics does not mean that Windows has a “positive balance”, i.e. that Linux suffered a net loss of servers to Windows. What it means is that there is a little bit of migration from Linux to Windows – but that does not mean that the opposite isn’t also happening. That’s the statistic we’re missing from this article.
Well, like the previous poster wrote, 5% is certainly not enough to justify a trolling headline like that. Besides, I’m sure that more servers switch from Windows to Linux.
It might be negligible, but it is interesting.
In the past we would never hear of companies migrating from linux to windows, because the cost of linux is mainly made up of the migrationcosts (from windows).
Those companies going back, what TCO do they expect?
…we may be seeing some migration back again as well once distrobutions are available that take advantage of the latest linux advancments.
Theres always that small crowd who will be running the latest and greatest. It doesn’t necessarily mean much.
Er, no – based on WHAT? Where I work the Exchange servers crash on a regular basis, our Unix (including Linux) boxen just hum and run. Costly to maintain – ugh. Do you know how many Unix admins we have compared to Win admins? Right.
Maybe web site developers are going back to Micro$oft because development tools are better eg Visual Studio, Cold Fusion?
Thats the only area where Microsoft beats Linux in my opinion.
Here is a hint sunshine:
Web sites continue to be switched from Linux to Windows Server 2003 at about the same rate as in July, according to statistics compiled by Netcraft. The company said the number of active sites running on Windows Server 2003 had grown to about 185,000, an increase of 109 percent since July.
Websites NOT desktops. BTW, one can run Coldfusion and ASP on *NIX without any problems. ASP is done via SUN Chill!soft ASP.
and that’s what you are seeing here folks. NORMAL, SANE and BALANCED people who know linux AND windows.
a lot of people like to keep updated on their skills…it’s not surprising to see a few linux boxes go offline, replaced by 2k3 servers….when 2.6 kernel goes release, you’ll see more then a 5% hit on windows servers.
hey, but this is osnews, where the inflammatory topics get the most comments.
but the fanboys could make an attempt to learn something new once in a while…
It says that Linux, Windows and FreeBSD are growing the number of sites hosted on servers running those operating systems. FreeBSD hosts something like 2 million sites. The big numbers for any OS in this survey are heavily influenced by what the hosting providers (includi ng shared hosting providers) are offering. To understand what these numbers mean, shop around for hosting. You’ll see a lot of FreeBSD (particularly in shared hosting), a lot of Linux, a lot of Windows and, for high-end sites, Sun. Which is a competitive market.
Regards,
Mark Wilson
I really have a difficult time beleaving anyone not employed by M$ could be so ignorant as to beleive the “statistics”; like M$ is above paying for the numbers that make it look good. give me a break. weakup people; Linux is a better product today and will continue to be unless M$ rewrites Windows.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/09/01/september_2003_web_ser…
Also the original netcraft article on the “Migration” to Windows Server 2003 mentions the fact that most of the migration is occuring on hosted systems, where the hosting providers have received very favorable terms ( read as bribes ) to switch to Windows2003.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/09/10/windows_server_2003_do…
I suggest you go back to statistics 101. Five percent barely above the usual statistical noise level of approximately +/- 3%. Netcraft is not the final authority on what a particular computer is running as it’s OS, nor are they an authoritative source on the population of the internet. It’s entirely possible that there are some companies switching from Linux or a Unix to Microsoft. It’s entirely possible that Netcraft’s statistics are correct given a proper error margin. But before you go saying who moved from what to where and that a statistic is newsworthy, ask your source if you can see THEIR source for the argument. Netcraft’s method of collecting information on OS fingerprints is highly susceptible to error, no matter what shifts they show, and are highly suspect. Any competent admin has the capability to cloak their OS traffic signature to emulate another OS. Netcraft does not seem to take into account the error introduced by it’s detection methods when it files a report on OS shifts so their numbers become highly suspect. If you wish to know how they get their information, it does say in their methods section. They acknolege that their methods can be erroneous, but they fail to mention a error margin.
I also need to point out that there will also always be companies that simply move onto each new fad in computing. There is always a rush to any new software upgrade be it Linux, BSD, Microsoft, IBM, or whoever. The numbers that count are the companies that generally are *not* moved by current trends such as medical services institutions, the Fortune 500, and research institutions.
From the report on Netcraft’s page, it seems that this is more of a service provider shift rather than individual customers that have their own service department moving it’s OS choices from one to another. Service providers simply sell a service to a company, the company gets certain garuntees of service, so long as the service meets the demand, the company purchasing the service generally doesn’t care what goes on behind the scenes beyond broad terms.
BMW released a new model two months ago, and 5% of customers used to drive a Mercedes!
Oh my God, Mercedes must make crap cars….
I sure hope Visual Studio is not the reason people change.
Visual Studio might be an okay editor, but the debugger is not very usefull, at least not when developing VB.net.
Debugger’s like SunOne’s, IntelliJ and more for languages like Java a way better than Visual Studio’s
It must be too difficult for some businesses to break free from proprietary hassles like those imposed by Microsoft upon their “admirers”. Well, I just hope those who depend on Windows Server 2003 won’t receive a surprise visit from the Gestapo, err…, the BSA accompanied by law enforcement officers. That day, maybe these switchers will realize that slavery has a high TCO and that a nice GUI isn’t necessary to run a reliable server.
I really have a difficult time beleaving anyone not employed by M$ could be so ignorant as to beleive the “statistics”; like M$ is above paying for the numbers that make it look good. give me a break. weakup people; Linux is a better product today and will continue to be unless M$ rewrites Windows.
A re-write of Windows will NEVER happen. Microsofts idea of fixing a problem is either adding more code or simply coding around the problem. It is though they subscribe the Soviet Defence doctrine of “quantity has its own quality”. It may be the case in terms of an Army, however, simply adding code willynilly isn’t going to fix the problem.
There have been Microsoft fanboys talking about Windows Longhorn going to do away with the legacy rubbish, IMHO, however, based on Microsofts previous “clean slate” hype-feasts, they’ll mearly code around the issues again, introduce a whole new set of problems, again, and again, the gullable public will suck it into “Irish Setter” style hope that *maybe* the next version will correct the problems.
As for a clean slate restart, there is nothing stopping them from doing it. There has already been an abstraction layer made before for the win32, the best example of this would be the SharedSource implementation of C# which used a win32 SAL.
If Microsoft created an OS based on FreeBSD 5.2, made the win32 available on it in the form of a SAL only requiring the vendor to recompile, the chances of a migration from NT -> BSD would be VERY high.
In a perfect world software companies would cleanly re-write, however, in reality, the software companies are run by techno-clueless managers who value release dates and hype more than delivering a quality product.
Microsoft needed to switch their DNS system to netcraft in order to avoid a big attack with the SoBig.wurms and other wurms virusses. And now Netcraft publishes this ?
I wonder if Microsoft paid two invoices, one for the service and one for the advertisement.
My company are switching to 2003 from NT. I’ve advised this move but in an ideal world I’d rather switch to Linux.
Unfortunately are infastructure is so based around ASP that we can’t make a direct move to Linux. However, 2003 is going to act as an intermediate step. We need far better stability and performance than NT4 but backwards compatability with our legacy apps so 2003 fits the bill.
However, we are merle using 2003 as a stepping stone to linux
I have recently done a little investigation of shared and dedicated web hosting sites. Here is what I found.
1.about half of all sites offering windows hosting also offer Linux hosting. Yet something like 80% sites offering Linux base hosting do not offer any windows options.
2.Of those sites that offer both Windows and Linux based hosting – will usually offer more variety of options on Linux servers than on Windows servers. That the Linux Servers will either cost less than the windows or offer a better feature package at the same price. This more than anything else suggest that Linux has a lower TOC of use.
3.Hosting sites that use only Linux based servers have far fewer outages than Hosting sites that use only Windows. It is not uncommon for Windows base hosting servers to show as many as 30 outages a year (one site had a staggering 120). While it is very common to find Linux based hosts with one or no outages in the last year.
4.I did the same survey last year as well. The change over the last year is as follows – sites offering… Unix based hosting down slightly, Linux Hosting strongly up, Windows hosting down noticeably.
5.I have also used “whats that site running” on Netcraft to do an unofficial survey of the major sites are running. I have found the following only one major TV network uses Windows Servers – the rest use either Linux or Unix. Of the big money players in e-business only ebay uses only Windows.
6.One last note: Last week I was in B&N books and was looking at the computer section. The amount of shelf space dedicated to Linux Books was at least 2/3 of the amount dedicated to All Windows books. – If you were to remove the Titles by Microsoft themselves and compare only those titles that were produced by third party publishers I am not all that sure that Windows would have more titles on sale than Linux.
You are kidding, right ?
Under Linux, the Emacs psychiatrist only make me save a _lot_ of money, and is as competent as a good portion of his very expansive colleagues.
That’s an hidden cost of windows computer.
And i don’t like them…
In reality, if one checks the statistics, Apache is the only platform that RAISED in percentage from August to September… So go figure (i can only imagine that people are then hosting apache in windows boxes so to keep the relevancy of the data).
On the other hand, server OS survey aren’t exactly precise. Some system administrator spooff the servers signatures just to add an extra layer of obfuscation to any hacking attempt…
Interisting reading thru, specially the reactions to it
The title should read :
“Windows 2003 upgrades going strong” or similar.
Clearly, ANY positive news for MS at the expense of Linux will not be accepted. I thought that was common knowledge.
Numbers are like people: if you torture them enough, they tell you anything. But don’t complain if they just told you what you wanted to hear.
😉
Serge
My company are switching to 2003 from NT. I’ve advised this move but in an ideal world I’d rather switch to Linux.
Unfortunately are infastructure is so based around ASP that we can’t make a direct move to Linux. However, 2003 is going to act as an intermediate step. We need far better stability and performance than NT4 but backwards compatability with our legacy apps so 2003 fits the bill.
However, we are merle using 2003 as a stepping stone to linux
Why didn’t you do a little more investigating before coming to the conclusion that *NIX can’t support ASP? Here we are, I’ve done the work for you:
http://wwws.sun.com/software/chilisoft/index.html
“Sun ONE Active Server Pages software is a secure, enterprise-class Active Server Pages (ASP) engine for the Sun ONE and Apache Web servers. Sun ONE Active Server Pages (ASP) is designed to help organizations deploy new or existing ASP applications within a secure and reliable Web infrastructure, such as the Sun ONE Web Server running on the Solaris Operating System. The new version 4.0, adds support for Microsoft ASP 3.0, VBScript/JScript 5.5, and XML, and includes enhancements to its COM-to-Java technology bridge and integration with popular Web authoring tools, such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver MX and Microsoft FrontPage.”
[/i]Supported:
Solaris 9 and 8 Operating Systems (SPARC® Platform Edition)
Linux (x86) Kernel 2.4, GLIBC 2.2.5
Red Hat Linux 7.3
SuSE Linux 8.0
Microsoft Windows NT and 2000[/i]
pfft. and what does this mean? 5% isn’t a *lot*, and you have to look at the other side of the story.
We need far better stability and performance than NT4 but backwards compatability with our legacy apps so 2003 fits the bill.
I think this implies there are other apps that they are unable to use in Linux.
I think this implies there are other apps that they are unable to use in Linux.
Funny how the only thing Peter Moss bothered to mentioin was ASP, yet, never names the products they need “legacy support for”.
I might as well say, “oh, I won’t move from MacOS because I need, well, weird and obscure application. I won’t name it but I am sure there isn’t a replacement on Windows”. That is the logic of Peter Moss’s post.
I think that you will find China, Japan, India, Germany, etc moving toward Linux rather than MS Windows.
…in North America, but mainly just the USA, you will see Microsoft being used, however that’s just one part of the world. Other countries don’t want to be victomized by Microsoft, so they will look for other options …like Linux.
First of all, the amount of sites switching isn’t negliable. They probably are mostly personal sites and sites of small businesses. Not the big bucks. If that isn’t the case, it would be a far far far bigger story.
Second of all, a lot of web developers have very little need of development tools. Web applications for the most part are rather simple. Those that are complex are normally those bought and sold (third party apps) or made by big websites (e.g. Amazon, Yahoo). In other words, development tools are negliable.
And besides, there are very good PHP development tools, although every one I know is made for Windows. But that doesn’t matter, as long as the end result can run on Linux. Plus, I haven’t heard yet of anyone using Visual Studio to make CGI apps either…
Apache 27388860 63.98 27836622 64.52 0.54
Microsoft 10165745 23.75 10156289 23.54 -0.21
Looks like Microsoft is down .21, I think that’s more important than a 5% shift. Shoot that could just be *2* Web providers LOL!
OMG, Bill Gates burped 5% louder today news at 11. 😛
Mainly outside of America, there are Titanic boat loads of users experimenting with open source tools for free. That’s all that really matters. These guys are going to be the leaders of tomorrow and that can only happen on an open source platform. As far as I imagine, businesses are not important. I would rather see Linux remain a platform and be the best source of knowledge and research for system implementation. On the other hand, why not spruce it up so that end users and businesses can realize that Linux offers everything to everyone.
Last month when this was reported, it turned out that although some Linux sites migrated to Windows 2003, Linux gained more web sites than it lost. It was also revealed that the availability of at least some sites that moved from Linux to Win2k3 plummeted, requiring reboots every few days according to Netcraft’s graphs.
The 5% is the number of new Win2k3 servers that switched from Linux. The number of new Win2k3 servers was stated as being around 180,000; and 5% of that is 3600 Linux servers. I don’t think thats a really big number if you compare it to the total number of Linux servers on the net.
This is probably the result of the mediahype. The amount of marketing Microsoft has put behind Windows 2003 has convinced a lot of companies that they offer something far better than everything else and when you go try it out it frankly isn’t that special and has a very high TCO since it’s costly to maintain.
Now people realize that you have so many viruses and so many problems with Windows Server 2003 that they finally move back to Linux eventually, after a couple of days of downtime and having to pay techs overtime because they had to stay and fix the problems that Windows 2003 presents. interesting indeed.
“Notably, the number of sites switching from Linux has proportionately kept pace since July when many commentators thought the 5% of sites switched to Windows 2003 from Linux was an aberration.”
“(16.5K) to be migrations from Linux”
“Myhosting.com continues to be the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and now has over 98% of their active sites migrated to Windows 2003.”
“Myhosting.com 32,810”
hmm..
last month
“Myhosting.com 13,504”
There’s your 5%, *1* provider.
This is news alright.
Windows server usage is down -0.21 percent and it down seems to be the trend right now, while Apache is up 0.54 percent. I know Apache and PHP can run on Windows however that is rare.
Only M$ can make hypes like these. I have asked friends who work in fortune 500 companies they are going for linux servers and desktops.
People are tired of windoze with full of holes.
> 5% is 1 in 20, thats not a small number. Good thing you aren’t running a business, at least not one I’ve invested in anyway.
Bad news, son: since the auditors can’t check every damn transaction in a company’s books, they have to set a limit under which any adjustment is considered “not significant” … and it often turns around 5% of something or other.
In your case, you have failed to register that the 5% refers to sites which began to use W2003 in July. It does *not* mean that 5% of all sites using Linux switched to W2003 in July!
The statistics are also very incomplete: to draw any half-valid conclusions we would also need to know the total number of new sites, or sites changing to other OSes, and the share of each OS in the total. I wonder how many Windows-based sites switched to Linux or a BSD, for example?
Also, are more people moving to any particular OS than are leaving it? What’s the net rate of growth for each? What’s the overall loyalty rate over several years?
Oh, and what exactly is the definition of a website? Individual URLs? The hardware count (ISPs have rather more than one website on their machines after all)?
I wonder how many of these conversions are valid win2k3 licenses. If you are some guy who is curious to the “media hype” what could it hurt to install a Warez copy of win2k3 or a 120 day eval?
The Bottom line is this. Statistics can be manipulated to suit either side. the truth cannot. Microsoft is struggling with secure even though stability has increased it is not where it should be. Certainly not at the level of Linux.
I think the article should be updated to show the truth.
Microsoft running Linux?!
The site http://www.microsoft.com is running Microsoft-IIS/6.0 on Linux. FAQ
Linux users include Hostway
….is running Linux on theire website sco.com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=sco.com
So, I’m just curious how much MS is investing in this media-hype? Whatever they will invest, its not going to destroy Linux. They have some competition from Linux in the Server area, and now that they have a product that is a little better, they wanna sell it of course, but hey, there is Linux in the way!
Myths about Linux:
1) Its expensive to deploy on server:
You’ll find pretty much everywhere skilled admins that know how to make a Linux server tick. Except that, even with a downloaded Slackware ISO you can build a very powerfull server running even Oracle. So except the hardware, and paycheck for the admin there is no cost involved. And on a good distribution maintnance is also easy.
2) Linux is not ready for the desktop.
It has enough apps, some games run on it and hardware support is decent. Its not that good as WinXP on the desktop, but on the other hand I don’t have to worry about works, spyware and all sorts of bars added in Explorer wich I don’t need, or how some dude said: When he goes online, someone else takes control…
3) LinuxIsTroubleHype!
Linux is not trouble, same software that runs on Linux runs also on FreeBSD, Darwin, MacOSX (well, most of it), OpenBSD, NetBSD… Take SCO: They ouldn’t say that they have stollen code in some OSS project because they wanted to attack Linux, so they toulk the kernel. What can a company say that has an RPM based distro, wich basicly compiles and packages free software and then sells it?
Many more bullsh*t from every other wise-guy who wants 15 minutes on OSNews or any other IT-News site…
What I never can understand is the moment any pro-MS news is released here, immediately people make it sound like it’s meaningless. And by people, I mean die hard linux fanatics. Personally I prefer to use windows on all levels, I run server 2003 at my home. Here at work, at a hospital, we have numerous servers. What do they run? Windows 2000 or 2003 server. We never have any downtime, except for on the servers of our main app, which is it’s own OS anyway (don’t get me started on terminals and term servers).
We have one other server that is a real pain. You know what that runs? IBM AIX, an IBM gui version of unix. This thing has so many problems. It’s the only dual cpu machine we have, yet it’s the slowest. Rebooting it took nearly 20 minutes and that’s not including all the command line steps one has to go through just to get all the services running again. Every day, I have to spend extra time with this machine because it doesn’t do “automated” tape backups. I actually have to stop the process and unmount the tape, etc. Right there I think my company is losing money.
Yes, I have tried to run linux many times for my home pc, ever since 95 I’ve tried once a year. Each time though, I feel that it’s not ready for mainstream use. The apps are never up to my expectations and there is too much of a hassle involved. My windows xp pro box never has a problem, and runs 24/7. That allows me to spend my time doing more important things, such as coding in .NET C++ and just enjoying the overall no hassle environment.
Linux is a great OS, I’ll give it that, but it’s just not ready for mainstream.
How many of these domains were domains that were parked on a Linux server based registrar and were then reassigned to the customer who runs Windows 2003?
All of this stuff is meaningless.
Rather shockingly, the Netcraft Web survey at
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/09/01/september_2003_web_ser…
indicates that not only has the %age of market share for MS Web servers been falling, but so has their absolute numbers (both in the “total” and “Active Sites” surveys). So Windows 2003 Server may well be increasing (as you’d expect for any new Web server release), but overall Windows servers are declining !
Hmm, how much is the home license for server 2003? LOL
Sorry been away a bit. The logic of the fact that at the moment we can only support ASP is the cost of moving a large amount of legacy code that is developed around a variety of 3rd party custom DLLs etc. (for integrating into other systems around the company amongst other things) and also a lot of our code uses functions unique to ADO (shape command etc.) and other ‘tricks’ of ASP, which are _NOT_ supported by other solutions such as SunASP – I know, I’ve spent quite a few hours trying to get it to work. Sure 80% of our code can get across but its no good without that other 20% which provides the core.
Also the biggest legacy ‘system’ is our team of developers. Sure I’d love to move them all over to Java but where does one get the training budget and how do you explain the months of lost development time?
Hence Windows 2003 is really our only option (bearing in mind we need the changes NOW not in a years time). Well not quite, I have developed (or am developing) a road map to get us out of this microsoft trap.
Here’s how:
Firstly, we’re going to move across to ASP.NET a jump from ASP but not too big especially seeing we can still use ASP for when we get stuck.
We are currently moving (slowly, over the next year or two) all of that 20% incompatible code (mostly database stuff) into web services outputting XML and not using ADO in the page.
All of our new systems are being redeveloped using the MVC model powered by XML and XSLT, or more precisely what some people describe as Model2x.
The XML/XSLT MVC model means that we will be able to easily convert all of our systems across to PHP or JSP on Linux in the future except that code which is too MS specific, but that’s OK because it is now a web server.
Or if the need be, wait a couple of years until Mono is mature enough to completely replace the entire MS framework.
I will admit that if more foresight had been given over the development then we wouldn’t be in this mess and a quick switch to Linux would be easy – unfortunately, as any experienced developer will know, when you join companies it seems you spend most of your time trying to repair the damage made by you predecessors really bad decision making. Hence why I’ve written a road map to get us out of this mess.
However I must say my impressions of IIS6 (compared to IIS5) are VERY disappointing. Security sucks, you STILL can’t separate web security from NTFS security (why not?) also if you need to turn on a service such as WebDav you can’t narrow it down to a single site you have to enable it for all sites. Seeing the amount of exploits aimed at WebDav I’d have thought MS would have sorted this lot out.
Actually, if you want to know, I’m in the MS beta program and I’m using the 120 day eval.
Could this be a result of a fear of an SCO lawsuit? Linux isn’t a good deal if you have to pay their licensing fees. And I doubt casual users want to fight lawsuits. To many of these sites, choice in OS is probably no more important than brands of hardware it’s run on. SCO’s prices are so high, nobody is going to use Linux on their web server if they have to pay that. Perhaps they could use linux 2.2 though. Linux 2.2 would probably do just as well on a web server. I wonder if SCO is part of the reason people are moving away from linux though.
Actually, if you want to know, I’m in the MS beta program and I’m using the 120 day eval.
Incredible !
Every time I see a study explaining how much MS products are better, how much the TCO is lower, how rare it crashes, the guy behing that is more or less sustained/payed by Microsoft.
You don’t fear people will become paranoiac ?
Sorry been away a bit. The logic of the fact that at the moment we can only support ASP is the cost of moving a large amount of legacy code that is developed around a variety of 3rd party custom DLLs etc. (for integrating into other systems around the company amongst other things) and also a lot of our code uses functions unique to ADO (shape command etc.) and other ‘tricks’ of ASP, which are _NOT_ supported by other solutions such as SunASP – I know, I’ve spent quite a few hours trying to get it to work. Sure 80% of our code can get across but its no good without that other 20% which provides the core.
Hmm, that doesn’t sound too nice. One has to first ask how much will WIndows 2003 cost you over the next 5 years and whether an opensource, be it Linux or FreeBSD outweighs the cost of sticking with the Windows tredmill.
Also the biggest legacy ‘system’ is our team of developers. Sure I’d love to move them all over to Java but where does one get the training budget and how do you explain the months of lost development time?
They could pick up a book and learn in their own time. Most of the people I know in the local Java users group got into Java by simply learning it, through books and resources in their own time.
Hence Windows 2003 is really our only option (bearing in mind we need the changes NOW not in a years time). Well not quite, I have developed (or am developing) a road map to get us out of this microsoft trap.
Here’s how:
Firstly, we’re going to move across to ASP.NET a jump from ASP but not too big especially seeing we can still use ASP for when we get stuck.
We are currently moving (slowly, over the next year or two) all of that 20% incompatible code (mostly database stuff) into web services outputting XML and not using ADO in the page.
All of our new systems are being redeveloped using the MVC model powered by XML and XSLT, or more precisely what some people describe as Model2x.
The XML/XSLT MVC model means that we will be able to easily convert all of our systems across to PHP or JSP on Linux in the future except that code which is too MS specific, but that’s OK because it is now a web server.
Or if the need be, wait a couple of years until Mono is mature enough to completely replace the entire MS framework.
Mono’s major strength will be the server side of it, and as long as you don’t use any weird, non-managed extensions, the transition should be made pretty easy.
I will admit that if more foresight had been given over the development then we wouldn’t be in this mess and a quick switch to Linux would be easy – unfortunately, as any experienced developer will know, when you join companies it seems you spend most of your time trying to repair the damage made by you predecessors really bad decision making. Hence why I’ve written a road map to get us out of this mess.
However I must say my impressions of IIS6 (compared to IIS5) are VERY disappointing. Security sucks, you STILL can’t separate web security from NTFS security (why not?) also if you need to turn on a service such as WebDav you can’t narrow it down to a single site you have to enable it for all sites. Seeing the amount of exploits aimed at WebDav I’d have thought MS would have sorted this lot out.
Ahh, the wonders of Windows. Ultimately, once you have moved from Windows, it will be alot easier later on to move to other platforms. As I said, there is Windows and the rest of the universe.
Windows is the leading commercial operating system, and there’s always flow to their direction for 1001 different reasons.
What actually is a bit surprising is that only 5% of their new users are migrating from Linux. However, Windows 2003 is such a small player yet (< 1% of active sites) that all percentages are meaningless.
Microsoft’s market share in web server business, however, is doing badly. Down from 35% to around 24%. They are soon back on the 1997 level.
You must realize that from a statistical point of view 5% is a pretty small number, especially when you take into account that netcraft can’t search *every* server. Think about it, is is probable that they are off by a couple of percent because of differences (in respect to the bigger picture) in the sample group? you can expect ~3% +/- error.
… then the tide will turn back to linux as all these evaluation copies of W2K3 expire 🙂
Lets take a realistic look at the statistics – Netcraft report 185,000 active sites now running Win 2003 server at an inrease over last month of 109% with 5% of these new sites coming from Linux. A quick calculation show that a total of about 4,800 sites conserted from Linux to Win 2003 a very small number.
Netcraft doe not report the OS breakdown in its monthly reports but it did its study on 43,144,374 sites 65% of which where runnin8 Apache assuming half of these sites are running Linux (the other half on a BSD or proprietary Unix) then the percentage shift to Win 2003 is about 0.03%.
However the monthly figures show a net shift from MS to Apache of 0.21 percent this means overall about 0.1% (on the above assumption of Apache on Linux) converted to Linux from Windows over the last month.
You see what the statistics show is that over the last month about many more sites went to Linux from Win NT and 2000 than went from from Linux to Win 2003. Overall the total number of active sites on the web hosted by Windows is declining.
>> You must realize that from a statistical point of view 5% is a pretty small number
5% is not a small number, it is not even a small percentage (IMHO). However, 185,000 (MS-Windows 2003 servers according to netcraft) out of > 40,000,000 (the approx. (conservative estimate) total number of servers surveyed by netcraft) is a small number and 0.5% is a small percentage.
The percentage of web servers which are Win2K3 servers that were formerly Linux servers, i.e. 0.02% is an extremely small percentage. It is an espescially small percentage when you consider that according to the BSA, 40% of softare is pirated (I would imagine this is an even greater number for newly released software, where people would like to “try before they buy”).
Haven’t we all heard of “independant” and “credible” scientific studies showing that Tobacco smoke is not harmful to you?
I think I know where all these “scientists for hire” went when the Tobacco companies were finally publicly exposed and held some-what accountable.
Perhaps SCO’s FUD might have had an influence an IT managers decisions to switch. WHEN SCO loses their lawsuits to IBM and Red Hat, these 5% companies ought to sue SCO for the costs to switch over. Way to go SCO! Keep up the pumping and dumping!
They aren’t companies, they are 1 company and one web farm. 😉
The number is 5% of the 88k Win Srvr 2003 web SITES online. It’s not 5% of all Linux servers. The number is not 5% of Linux anything – more like .00000000005%
Interesting that the article doesn’t indicate the # of Linux servers or websites online. Knowing those numbers would help give some perspective.
They need all the help they can get.
“”Actually, if you want to know, I’m in the MS beta program and I’m using the 120 day eval.””
“Incredible !
Every time I see a study explaining how much MS products are better, how much the TCO is lower, how rare it crashes, the guy behing that is more or less sustained/payed by Microsoft.”
Microsoft charged $20.00 for the W2K3 beta kit. Anybody could buy it.
Jeez,what are some of you people going to do once Linux rules?
I have seriously come to despise headlines… more often than not they are pure bs, and do not accurately describe the truth held within the content of the article.
The problem with this is that far too many people only scan the headlines — people don’t have time to actually read the article.
The outcome? People end up believing whatever the headlines say, regardless of what the article says.
The company I work for is constantly migrating sites from Windows to Linux… on a weekly basis.
I’d say we average at least a few thousand per month from Windows to Linux.
See this stat:
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/200308/graphs.html
Apache still grows, and IIS declines steadily. All this noise is pure concentrated FUD.
Maybe web site developers are going back to Micro$oft because development tools are better eg Visual Studio, Cold Fusion?
… I agree
VS.NET is a very productive development environment. This fact drives the choice of OS for web servers.
It’s their loss, not ours. Not even worth commenting on.
But still I do??????
>Maybe web site developers are going back to Micro$oft because >development tools are better eg Visual Studio, Cold Fusion?
>Thats the only area where Microsoft beats Linux in my >opinion.
I hope you realize that you can develop w/ ColdFusion on a Winders Desktop and FTP the site over to the Webserver. Most organizations DO NOT develop on the live, production website. I would be scared if they did. That said, you can put together your site with any number of tools or even just a plain old text editor and run the site on Windows, Linux, Novell, *nix, Apple, and no one will no the difference until you move to something like .ASP or possibly .JSP. Personally I don’t like either, they are slow. I don’t mind .PHP as it is fully cross-platform, but it can be slow.
Anyway, my point is that, if the IT shop knows what they are doing they can run any kind of server and use whatever dev tools they want.
randy (IP: —.usagroup.com) – Posted on 2003-09-12 21:43:31
Maybe web site developers are going back to Micro$oft because development tools are better eg Visual Studio, Cold Fusion?
… I agree
What has development tools have to do with the platform itself? We are talking about SERVERS NOT WORKSTATIONS! READ AND REPEAT, SERVERS NOT WORKSTATIONS.
Btw, Cold Fusion is a server NOT a development application. If you want to develop for Cold Fusion, you use Dreamweaver, which is available on the Mac and PC.
OK I stuffed up. Quoting from someone else:
“In your case, you have failed to register that the 5% refers to sites which began to use W2003 in July. It does *not* mean that 5% of all sites using Linux switched to W2003 in July! ”
Yes I read it and assumed it meant 5% of Linux sites. Very silly of me.
If you look at the % in terms of all Linux sites its probably .00001% or something. Definitely insignificant.
As for statistics I never studied them, except at high school. And I found it to be a very dodgy subject, very imprecise. I could see 1 or 2% being insignificant but 5% seems fairly large to me. And as someone else stated, Netcraft don’t provide their “margin for error” so really who knows how reliable their statistics are anyway.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics…..
So that more clueless IT admin will keep on switching from Linux to Windows. And MS owe SCO a lot for creating the FUD that profitable to MS.
P/S: SCO maybe can sue MS for something out of this scenario
our company moves people onto linux every day and the M$ TCO stuff is BULLSHIT. We hardly have to touch our servers, just the odd apt-get update @@ apt-get upgrade. Certainly cheaper than going on site to install m$ hotpatches, or removing viruses, rebooting, etc etch ad nauseum
Microsoft’s Visual Studio is a slick, mature tool. But I was really disapointed with the .Net enviroment for web development.. All of the ‘slick’ tools were to write server side controls. So basically, if you use the ‘wizards’ to genreate your web site, you end up with a slow server that doesn’t scale very well. I ended up hand coding a bunch of JavaScript and replacing the server side controls with old fashioned (but still reliable) html controls. This let me move move more of the logic client side, which really improved the resonsiveness of the site.
So, I have mixed feelings about Visual Studio. It has a bunch of great fetures, but if you don’t use it ‘the Microsoft way’ the results can be disapointing.
I agree with you for the most part. I think that Visual Studio is a cool IDE for developing desktop applications, and I like the C# language quite well, but I can’t emphasize enough how much I detest ASP.NET and the whole “internet” aspect of Visual Studio and .NET.
I think integration of different technologies is a good thing, but I can’t for the life of me understand why Microsoft continually chooses to do it in the most idiotic, resource intensive way release after release.
Funny thing is, when I got a (really lame) .Net demo CD, they mostly advertised integration with the web and everything as if it was absolutely easy, transparent and efficient, and almost like clicking “export to [whatever it was]” and enjoying the “ride”.
I’ll always be surprised at people switching back to windows, after all these recent virii which can enter without any user intervention or error.
One would expect flaws that exist since Windows NT 4 to be covered in Windows XP, at least.
And to me, Microsoft has lost all sort of credibility, because I’ve seen them lie and do absurd things too many times.