Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
I just can't keep myself from responding to this.
First, Microsoft "bought" this statistics, by going to large domain name registrars and offering them incentives to park their domains on IIS to pump up the traffic. One of those is GoDaddy, and with the number of domains they park, you see the spike in there. I agree that GoDaddy and other big players is part of the reason for the spike in IIS use (even Netcraft reported that as one of the potential reasons for IIS gains against Apache). However, it's also important to realize that it's a lot easier to run PHP these days on IIS. Zend Technologies over the past year has made significant inroads to pushing PHP onto other platforms beyond LAMP. See: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2193783,00.asp
Zend and Microsoft built on a partnership the companies fostered over the last year, beginning with last year's ZendCon PHP conference. This year, Microsoft announced the release of the GoLive beta of an Internet Information Services add-on component, FastCGI. FastCGI serves as an interface between PHP and an IIS Web server delivering substantial reliability and performance benefits for PHP applications running on Windows. It is now available for free from Microsoft at http://www.iis.net/php. These days, there really are not many differences to how a PHP application runs on either Apache or IIS. I think the use of running PHP on IIS will only continue to increase and not decrease. I spent the last five years running an in-house PHP CMS on IIS/Windows for an office Intranet server. Recently we switched the Intranet over to Apache/Linux and except for a few minor changes in the scripts, the migration was easy. The organization I work for has a pretty healthy mix of Windows, Linux, and Unix clients/servers and it's been my experience that all platforms have merit. Drupal should be Drupal, no matter what platform or server it runs on. JMHO. -Bryan