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Roy Schestowitz (TechRights.org)reports
Microsoft Windows is a malware farm, so it oughtn't be too shocking that Web spam ("link farms"), according to Netcraft's latest figures (via), is driving up Microsoft's share (along with what seems like bribed hosts of parked domains). "Microsoft spin" is what our readers called it. Here is what Netcraft says:
Microsoft's most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms. The sites in question provide advertising for gambling sites, online product listings, and normally make use of affiliate schemes. Yet they are hosted in the USA, on generic TLDs such as .com and .net to bypass China's TLD and internet content provider (ICP) license requirements. Unusually, each linkfarm makes use of a reasonably large number of domains and IP addresses, presumably making them harder for search engines to evade. This would normally be cost prohibitive for this kind of activity, however hosting and domain packages can be found advertised on auction sites specifically for this purpose, with packages of (random/unspecified) .com domains available for as little as 17 Yen (~ £2 / $3) each, guaranteed to remain yours for at least a month. It is not clear why IIS has been chosen for these sites, however it does have a considerably higher market share (for all of our metrics) in China compared to worldwide for example 59% of domains hosted in China use IIS compared to just 29% worldwide.
We previously explained the role of parked domains as well. Here are some posts from a few months ago:
Microsoft software is not only behind inactive domains; it is also running behind spam (link farms). What a source of pride, eh? Microsoft's real market share on the Web is ~10%, depending on how it's measured. Top sites hardly have anything from Microsoft in them, so the total active site/domain count can be very misleading. Microsoft's share on the Web (measured in terms of number of requests for a page) may actually be something far lower than 10%, and maybe lower than 5%.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @09:26PM
The techrights article has an interesting graph, looks like nginx is about to pull ahead and become the #2 server on the net.
I haven't messed with it at all not even just screwing around at home, but probably will have to soon, to keep current with trends and stuff.
From gossip I've heard it doesn't do anything fundamentally shocking. Less backward compatible for weird configurations, and a little faster in workloads carefully contrived to make it look better, and practically undocumented, all in comparison to Apache.
I haven't found a problem with Apache yet, in the sense of "Oh s#!t I can't use apache and gotta install something else right now" but it'll surely happen sooner or later.
In long term trends my annoyance is frameworks (I'm looking at you, Play!) refuse to cooperate with anything and just wanna be "the" webserver for your app, so especially if you have multiple "things" per server you end up running framework'd apps on port 8001 or whatever and then complicated and easy to F up rewriting rules to rewrite /somedamnapp to localhost:8001/ and I hope the framework toy server doesn't crash and I hope the framework isn't too pissed off that something in the middle is rewriting all the URLs making its forward and reverse routes look a little weird. Yeah yeah I know just link directly to whatever:8001/ would be simpler but good luck explaining to a security droid who still thinks netmasks are questionable new technology and the internet still routes on classful addresses to allow port 8001 access to your webserver "bububububu but, webservers use port 80 not 8001. Doesn't opening two ports make you precisely twice as open to attacks from cyber criminals? Thats what I saw on 24 and NCIS last night." And he owns the keys to the firewall so thats how life is.
Would be interesting to hear any real world stories about nginx or Cthulhu Help Us nginx on a microsoft OS just to keep it on the article topic.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday August 05 2014, @03:16AM
Haven't tried nginx for anything, though experimenting with lighttpd in the past made me realise that I like using it more than apache. First experimented with it for use on a VPS with really tight memory constraints, and ended up sticking with it because I like the configuration more than Apache's pseudo-html structure. Apache's still great, there's just this whole "it's not you, baby, it's me, we should see other daemons for a while" thing between it and me now that I spent some time with an alternative.
The config file grammar is rather simplistic, largely just namespace.variable = value type things, plus some other bits that feel right at home with anybody comfortable with curly brace languages, but what got me hooked was include_shell. With it, you can generate parts of the configuration dynamically; include_shell executes the script given and then treats its output like part of the static config file. Basically a config file equivalent of perl's eval() function, it lets you add complexity via your language of choice while still keeping the config files themselves clean to read.
That plus the lightness was enough to sell me on lighttpd. I did miss apache .htaccess configuration a bit at first, though in retrospect I was mostly using it to be lazy rather than out of any real need of it. At the risk of veering even farther off-topic, I like using it plus eperl set as a cgi handler for an extension of choice. The convenience of PHP-style page creation, but with a language that (IMO) isn't as shitty.
This is all just preference for personal use, of course. Making something for others usually means back to apache+php because it's what they expect.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Tuesday August 05 2014, @01:20PM
The numbers are a little strange to calculate since it's common to use nginx in conjunction with something else. My own website would show up as nginx (95% of it is served by nginx), but there's also some dynamic content served by Apache behind it (bridged via proxy). Soylent news itself uses nginx for ssl termination for example.