The August 2007 Netcraft Web server survey shows Apache losing a number of sites, going from 66144734 to 65153417.  This 1.5% decline, 991317 sites in one month, shows up as a drop in market share (-1.73%).

Apache still has about 23 million more sites than IIS.  Put this another way, Apache currently has about 1.5 times as many sites as IIS. 

These figures include parked sites.  In active sites, the results are even closer.  Apache has 1.29 parked sites for each active site.  IIS has 1.05 parked sites for each active site.

I believe that this is both bad news and good news.  The surge in growth for IIS portends ill for those whose sites are developed using non-Microsoft technologies (such as this one).  It really speaks to the chosen platforms of the big hosting companies, and it indicates that many of them are promoting their Windows hosting services above their heretofore popular LAMP platform hosting services.

On the other hand, Lighttpd is finally being counted. For too long, the whole FLOSS world hid behind Apache. Because of surveys like Netcraft's, it was important to hide the true platform and put more clout behind Apache.  Otherwise, the proprietary give-us-the-control crowd would be crowing about their presumed victory.  While they may yet do this within a year or two, I think the fact that lighttpd is now counted shows us the way forward: common standards, diverse implementations.  I look forward to having a dozen free and open source Web servers with enough market share to be included in the surveys.

This does require that we make sure standards are clear and concise, including specifying extension mechanisms and how one should deal with unknown extensions. 

Finally, I notice that the Security Space survey shows quite different results,