beginning web developers don't run their own servers. they might run wamp on a local test machine, but everybody deploys to cheap shared hosts where they don't have a choice of server.

I don't know (or particularly care) what my personal site is running on. i pay dreamhost a couple bucks and they take care of all that boring stuff for me.

You don't need to run your own server to have a choice. Running a VPS with root access is cheap these days. Even on a shared server to still have choice (at least IIS vs Apache).

Of course, you also have a choice not to care, but then you probably don't do any server side programming.

I agree. I'm a beginner and have used Apache because it's just what comes with everything. My non-toy sites always use Apache as I know I'm less prone to trouble because of my experience with it.

I do have a VPS account with Webbynode which lets you run several Linux flavors, and a choice of nix, apache, or node which is cool but still scary for someone like me who is comfortable with the command line on my own file system but a little shaky when SSH-img into my VPS.

This might sound dumb, but I'm a server newbie. What I've always wondered is why anyone would use IIS at all? It seems like all MS products make you jump through hoops to do simple things that work on Apache ad others with just a click or simple command. It's been a while since I've experienced it so I wish I could point to so,etching more solid but I remember a few years back having to install PHP on IIS with MySQL and it was a pain plus not everything worked by default and there was just a lot of hoops to jump through just to get a simple CRUD app online. What does IIS offer that others don't?

Also, why does most enterprise software get built with ASP and .NET? I'm in a CIS program in college and they're all about teaching us Microsoft technologies and I can't stand it because I feel like I'll be using languages, frameworks, and other tech that's open for the most part in real world situations (I don't plan to be a corporate programmer, I'm already in business for myself). Please excuse my ignorance, I really do just wonder, I could be thinking totally backwards here.

It depends on your clients and/or the work you're doing. On the server-side, I do almost entirely ASP.NET work for small and medium business. Much of that is public-facing and you wouldn't know it was .NET unless you viewed the source and looked pretty closely. You certainly can build drab, enterprisey software with ASP.NET (or any other language), but you can also build sites like Stack Overflow just as easily.

Trying to host an ASP.NET 4/MVC3 site on Apache would be a nightmare. So, for the same reason you might tend to avoid IIS for your PHP work, .NET developers will prefer IIS for their work.

As for why so much "enterprise" software is written in languages like C# and Java, I believe it has a lot to do with those companies having very large teams with high turnover. Static languages (and their tooling) do have some compelling advantages in that situation.

I think the statistics are entirely irrelevant now -- if they were ever relevant in the first place.

Almost everything serious runs behind some sort of proxy, and those proxies often front for heterogeneous back-end systems, and even those back-ends might offload some of their logic to other systems.

There are too many interweaved layers in complex web services, and too many parts that can be (and routinely are) put together in too many different ways. The identity of the front-end is interesting only in a rather attenuated sense, and it can usually be trivially swapped out for another.

I recently hosted my SAAS on Linode nginx (https://www.wireframes.org)

Linode has stack scripts for the LEMP stack (linode uses "E" for the njinx). I agree there should be similar stack for windows to increase adoption

> linode uses "E" for the njinx

Apparently, nginx is meant to be pronounced "engine x."