[Cialug] IIS Link Farms

[Todd Walton]

"Microsoft is now the new market leader [vs Apache] with a 37.5% share of
all sites."
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/07/31/july-2014-web-server-survey.html

However, if you only count *active* sites Apache remains the king of the
heap.  The reason for IIS's lead:

"Microsoft’s most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the
most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms (泛站群). The
sites in question provide advertising for gambling sites, online product
listings, and normally make use of affiliate schemes. Yet they are hosted
in the USA, on generic TLDs such as .com and .net to bypass China’s TLD and
internet content provider (ICP) license requirements. Unusually, each
linkfarm makes use of a reasonably large number of domains and IP
addresses, presumably making them harder for search engines to evade. This
would normally be cost prohibitive for this kind of activity, however
hosting and domain packages can be found advertised on auction sites
specifically for this purpose, with packages of (random/unspecified) .com
domains available for as little as ¥17 (~ £2 / $3) each, guaranteed to
remain yours for at least a month. It is not clear why IIS has been chosen
for these sites, however it does have a considerably higher market share
(for all of our metrics) in China compared to worldwide - for example 59%
of domains hosted in China use IIS compared to just 29% worldwide."

It's because open source is like kryptonite to evildoers.  Corruption and
wrongdoing are repelled by its angel-crowned glow of purity.

--
Todd