To be fair, this specific statistic is only one out of many collected by Netcraft, and in some parameters, Apache still has a noticable lead because it is a solid product that gets the job doen for those who prefer it. What's important here for us at Microsoft is that fact that the growth shows that IIS is moving in the right direction, and that our customers are able to take advantage of the new features we have been introducing regularly (some specifically architected to cater to the need of high-end environments like hosters, enterprises and cloud providers).

This allows creating new sites, creating app pools and customizing configuration, all from managed code, and can save a lot of time for developers and system administrators.

For more information, visit the article.

As a result, many users turn off logging completely, although this can make it impossible to track down suspicious or illegal activity. The good news is that there are multiple ways to keep a tight leash on log size without turning logging off. The following article by Jim Van De Erve discusses several methods, from simple disk compression to a 3rd party tool that trims the logs automatically.

Click here to read more

To do this, you can use the IIS manager as-is, without any need for special installation. The trick is connecting to a special URL which exposes the properties and allows the console to connect remotely. For full details on doing this, read this blog post.

We also want to assure our customers that default configurations of Windows do not include OpenSSL, and are not impacted by this vulnerability.   Windows comes with its own encryption component called Secure Channel (a.k.a. SChannel), which is not susceptible to the Heartbleed vulnerability.

This applies to all Windows operating systems and IIS versions, up to and including IIS 8.5 running on any of the following operating systems:

•             Windows Server 2003 and 2003R2
•             Windows Server 2008
•             Windows Server 2008R2
•             Windows Server 2012
•             Windows Server 2012R2

Customers running software on Windows that uses OpenSSL instead of SChannel (for example, running the Windows version of Apache), may be vulnerable.  We recommend that all customers who may be vulnerable follow the guidance from their software distribution provider.  For more information and corrective action guidance, please see the information from US Cert here.

To make things easier for IIS and other products, Microsoft support has setup a new blog resource called “Top Support Solutions”, which offers a hand-picked selection of links and information about Microsoft’s leading products.

Wei Zhao from Microsoft support in China has lent his time to collecting such a collection for IIS, and we’re sure you’ll find it useful. You can find it here. In addition, Jim Cheshire from Microsoft support in Las Colinas, Texas, has done a similar job of hand-picking solutions for Azure Web Sites.

On the main blog page, you can find other collections for 34 additional products, ranging from Windows 8.1 to Unified Access Gateway (UAG).

We hope these will make your day-to-day experience a healthy one!

According to NetCraft, a research company from the UK which specializes in analyzing the web and hosting market, IIS has had a huge spike in market share recently. According to the report they released a few days ago, IIS had almost 50 million new sites during February, increasing it’s market share by 19%.

This is great news because it’s not only a large increase by itself, but also means that 32.8% of the websites in the world are running on Microsoft servers. This bring IIS close to a nose-to-nose with Apache (at 38% market share).

According to our own survey, IIS 7.5 is the most popular version, running on about 60% of the IIS Servers on the public internet. Neither this or NetCraft’s data include internal servers, such as those running SharePoint inside the corporate network of many companies, so the actual percentage is probably even higher.

The full details of the NetCraft survey: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/03/february-2014-web-server-survey.html

Fowler’s https://windowsazurewebsitescheatsheet.info/ allows you to explore this in a friendly and intuitive interface, and get to the bottom line quickly and easily. It has info about features, as well as detailed reference info about our command-line interface.

Great stuff, Corey! Check it out, everyone!

As site owners do various things to try to draw more visitors, like doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or buying ads on other websites, we typically examine our traffic patterns over time, to see if these efforts are working, and this is also a good way to find out if there might be some problem with a site (for example, some application error that’s preventing visitors from using the site fully or partially). As we look at such trend reports, we sometimes find that traffic has decreased despite our efforts. This can be very frustrating, of course…but it’s important to know that sometimes, this trend is nothing more than seasonal fluctuations. Seasonal fluctuations are changes to traffic trends that are caused by normal seasonal human behavior, and have nothing to do with your content. For example, during Christmas, many people go on vacations and spend less time on the internet. If you measure your traffic over the period of October-January, you’re bound to see a decrease in traffic, no matter what you do to the site. Understanding these trends is very important, because it allows you to adjust your expectations, and see how you’re really doing despite these trends.

Trends are a game of numbers, and so I gathered some statistics that can help you understand these trends. Below you can find a trend-graph of visitors and changes over the year. I should note that these numbers represent the trends in the technical-content world, and not commercial site trends (which would be different, because during Thanks Giving, for example, people spend less time reading articles, but more time shopping online). The data below is for the year 2013, and based on data from several high-volume content websites with a total visitor count in the vicinity of 16 million visitors a month. I don’t claim that this represents the entire world, but I feel this is a pretty good and accurate sample, statistically. Use at your own risk…

Visitors trending

Below is the graph representing visitors from January (1) to December (12) of 2013:

The Y axis intentionally doesn’t contain the “real” numbers, because they don’t really matter…every site would have a different count, so treat these as a factor, rather than a hard number. If you plot your own visitor count on a graph like this, you should expect to have a similar graphic pattern. However, what really matters to us is not the bottom numbers, but the CHANGE over time. The change patterns I calculated are below, both in table form and graph:

Conclusion

I should say again that the numbers above are not absolute, and can be affected by many factors. For example, if your content focusses solely on Operating Systems, then something like a release of a new version of Windows could throw off the curve quite a bit. However, generally, the above values mean that it’s perfectly normal for your visitor count to drop by about 20% from October to November (where Thanks Giving happens) and then go back up by about 36% in January, as people finish their holiday vacations and go back to work.

To apply this to your own data, calculate your month-over-month change, and reduce the global change from it to see your “real” change. For example:

In the above example, when the change is adjusted, you can see that for most months, you have an average growth rate of about 2.7%. You can also see that there was a major dip in May and a major spike in October. This could be good news, if the October spike matches some action you took to improve your traffic. Another good news in the example above is that the major dip in visitors in August is not really 7%, but only 1.2%, as 5.8% are due to seasonal trends. The not so great news above is that something unusual happened in May. It might have been something going wrong with the site itself, or something else, like a global disaster. Either way, this gives you the data to know what’s going on.