Netcraft Survey Updated

The latest survey is out and ready for reading from Netcraft. There's some interesting commentary in regards to Code Red, and its effects on web usage. One of the things that I found most interesting was the data showing that while the number of sites hosted by Apache continues to grow, the number of physical webservers running some variety of Windows is about half of the total. Worth checking out.

Comments

Assessment leaves something to be desired

[Anonymous Coward]

The analysis are a bit skewed in several well-known ways.

• Hosts are being counted here, and the manner in which they are discovered (zone transfers),
  means that a LOT of garbage (parked sites, unused sites, etc) is being picked up. Having a dead site disappear doesn't mean an awful lot.
  
• Claiming that 80,000 IIS servers disappeared without having a context as to what the normal month-to-month change is means nothing. How many servers changed hands the previous month? The month before that? One needs context, which is missing here. An example of actual month-to-month analysis published regularly can be found at SecuritySpace's monthly theft & upgrade reports. Here you can see the changeover for actual live sites.
  
• Claiming sites haven't yet reacted to Gartner group's recommendations is a bit bogus as well. I don't know any shop that will within a one week time frame make this kind of fundamental shift, port applications/pages, etc. It's would be much more instructive to see how the MS market share pans out by, say, the end of this up-coming January.
  
• Claiming there is significant growth in Germany: this is because of a the receipt of a new zone transfer file, not because of actual growth. In fact, SecuritySpace's numbers show actual market share for Germany shrinking (from 7.95% in August to 7.76% in September).
  

Statistics are useful, but one must take care to understand exactly what they are saying, and to also understand the impact of data collection mechanisms in place.