The market that Microsoft directly competes in (using
IIS) has never been anywhere near the shared hosting
space
That's not from a lack of trying on Microsoft's part.
And eliminating shared-hosting from a statistic like this is exactly how Microsoft would do it - introducing bias to turn the numbers in their favor.
Does EC2 count as shared hosting btw? What about Heroku?
to remove noise from the dataset
Sure, I'm all for removing parked domains. But there are lots of business and professionals that have their website hosted with shared accounts, websites that are useful for their target audience, even though they may not be in the TOP-whatever. Excluding those websites from such a metric would do a disservice to people.
Otherwise you could end up seeing IIS loose in a
market space that it never was in
Or you could say that you would see IIS win in a market space that's getting crushed by shared hosting.
It's a comparison of popularity between similar front-end web servers, which does have something to say about cost and feasibility of hosting multiple websites on top of cheap servers. Otherwise the comparison is useless, as popularity doesn't really matter to big corporations and startups that know what they are doing and are likely to choose Nginx anyway.
On GoDaddy Windows/IIS hosting starts at $4.99, and Microsoft is known to cut deals with such providers. I also remember a talk from MIX in which a microsofty said Microsoft is working with hosting providers to give devs an alternative just as cheap as EC2 Linux instances.
You can get cheap IIS hosting and cheap hosting with ASP.NET. Microsoft also has a web edition of SQL Server which is licensed at a reasonable rate for people who want to use it on a dedi/vhost or in shared hosting.
If you like IIS & SQL Server in shared hosting it's a reasonable option.
Frankly, more people like PHP + MySQL. If you like Windows you can run that on Windows but people and hosting providers.tend to like Unix more.
And eliminating shared-hosting from a statistic like this is exactly how Microsoft would do it - introducing bias to turn the numbers in their favor.
Does EC2 count as shared hosting btw? What about Heroku?
Sure, I'm all for removing parked domains. But there are lots of business and professionals that have their website hosted with shared accounts, websites that are useful for their target audience, even though they may not be in the TOP-whatever. Excluding those websites from such a metric would do a disservice to people. Or you could say that you would see IIS win in a market space that's getting crushed by shared hosting.It's a comparison of popularity between similar front-end web servers, which does have something to say about cost and feasibility of hosting multiple websites on top of cheap servers. Otherwise the comparison is useless, as popularity doesn't really matter to big corporations and startups that know what they are doing and are likely to choose Nginx anyway.