Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

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It has probably escaped no one that Amazon had several days of serious issues with its cloud hosting service last week, which took a large number of sites either fully or partly offline, including sites like Reddit, Foursquare and Quora.

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Two weeks ago we released the beta of our new public report pages (also known as status pages), and we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we’ve received from our users.

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The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?

Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?

Perhaps the most famous example is the LAMP stack that lies behind so many websites, i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. But there’s so much more when you think about it.

Here are some of the open source projects that make the Web tick.

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The World Wide Web would be nothing without web servers, and Apache has been king of that hill for a long time now. Although its market share has been slipping a bit in recent years, Apache came back with a vengeance in 2010.

This became abundantly clear as we examined the growth of the top five web servers during the past year, from December 2009 to December 2010. As you’ll see, Apache really had a great year.

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Happy Holidays everyone!

Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.

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When Apple introduced push notifications to the iPhone this summer, we immediately thought of what a great match it would be for our monitoring service. After all, the main point of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service is getting alerts when your website or server goes down.

So, when we started work on version 2.0 of our iPhone app, this was one of our top priorities. Now the new version is here, with push notifications, graphs, and more.

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This is a guest post by David Walsh from WebHostingSearch.com.

HostingCon 2009 in Washington DC is just around the corner. It is the largest hosting conference and provides a great opportunity for people in the industry to discuss the future and the changes in the industry. We are going to give you a sneak peek at 10 trends that most likely will be discussed at the DC event.

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Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about customer poaching in the web hosting industry, especially in combination with downtime incidents, sometimes referred to as “rescue marketing”.

What happens is that when a hosting provider suffers from downtime (which will understandably result in lots of frustrated customers), competing companies will swoop in and try to take advantage of this. In the past this was often accomplished with text ads in search engines, but these days Twitter is becoming an increasingly common way to target customers.

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