Apache Webserver Surpasses 50 Million Website Mark

chris81 writes "For the first time ever, the Apache Web Server is powering more than 50 million websites, according to Netcraft's Web Server Survey for October. Although relative share fell by 0.67 percent, the total number of sites powered by Apache grew to over 52 million. Microsoft's IIS finished second with more than 15 million sites served."

Comments

Err....

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Microsoft's IIS finished second with more than 15 million sites served.
Now did they try to find how many actually work ;)

Micosoft salesrep

[kryten_nl]

Microsoft salesrep: "You know, Apache's relative share fell by *cough*0.*cough* 67 percent!!!"

Re:I'm impressed

[AvantLegion]

True. But once you remove the porn, there's only about 500 or so.

Re:...and

[KiloByte]

I wonder how they count it when you have different names for a single site:

<VirtualHost *>
                ServerName urukpr0n.angband.pl
                ServerAlias urukporn.angband.pl urukp0rn.angband.pl urukpron.angband.pl
[...]
(No, this site isn't what you think.)

This is especially important if you count the fact that in a lot of cases www.$SITE is a CNAME for $SITE.

Re:I'm impressed

[aussie_a]

Such an enormous collection of data, it boggles my mind.

Here's a list of what the sites are (from most populous): 1: Porn sites
2: Spam sites
3: Spyware sites
4: Scamming sites
5: Warez sites
6: Blogs
7: Message boards
8: Wikipedia duplicates (where they copy and paste Wikipedia entries)
9: Software related sites
10: Other business related sites
11: Education-related websites.

As you can see, most of it is just rubbish.

Re:Odd lines in chart

[larien]

The big movers are the domain registrars; they'll host several hundred parked domains on a single server. While they're all using the same content (probably the same files, even), they'll show up as hundreds of sites. If they move from Apache to IIS (or vice versa), several hundred (or thousand?) websites appear to switch.

Three considerations

[VincenzoRomano]

#1. Sites vs servers.
Netcraft states they count the sites while they don't mention whether they count 2nd level domains (foo.com), 3rd level domains (www.foo.com, support.foo.com) or what else. They just say they "received responses from 74,409,971 sites" while not defining what a site actually is.

#2. Growth.
There has been a growth of about 3.73% in the number of (so called) web sites. There must be some hidden winner(s). That is, there must be some group of web servers that is getting the great part of the growth all at once! Netcraft is failing to mention who they are!

#3. Webserver (or website) identification.
It's all but trivial to identify web servers. Are they using some special tool like amap and nmap or just looking at the server response content? How accurate this identification can be?

what operating systems are popular with Apache?

[SgtChaireBourne]

I would be interested to see what OSes those sites are running on

Netcraft used to show a summary with that information. I'm not sure why they stopped showing it, since they do still collect it and show it for individual site queries. I suppose if enough people ask them to reinstate it, they might actually reply to one of the messages and explain the rationale. More likely than not it probably made it evident that one of their major advertisers **cough**MS**cough was losing market share to both other http servers and other platforms.

Along the same lines, I saw a recent IDC report that showed (if one looked at the data oneself) that MS was continuing to lose market share in the server room, at least percentage wise. My guess is that they took most of Novell's share around 2000 when they ran the smear campaign against Netware and then have been slowly hemorrhaging marketshare since then.

Re:...and

[Anonymous Coward]

Not 23 million actual servers, just 23 million different sites. Probably hosted on just a few hundred thousand physical servers. Netcraft "active sites" calculation is based on an estimate from contacting each server IP address a few times using a selection of the registered names and then comparing them. e.g. if you host 4000 domains which all say "We own this domain $domain, why not offer us money for it?" Netcraft will notice that 4000 names lead to that IP address, connect say 14 times, get a very similar response each time and conclude that there is only one active site.

23 million servers would represent almost 1% of all unicast IPv4 addresses (and AFAIK Netcraft don't look for IPv6-only servers)

Just need to check

[peterpi]

I'm just updating my fanboyism and I need to check some figures.

• IIS' 20% market share is rubbish.
• Firefox's 10% share is the greatest thing evar.

Re:I'm impressed

[drstock]

"I'm fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the Internet, there'd only be 1 website left, and it would be called Bring Back The Porn."
- Dr Cox from Scrubs.

Re:Why use IIS?

[ooh456]

Here are the top 10 reasons people choose IIS over Apache:

10. Because they don't know what they are doing.
9. Because their customers don't know what they're doing.
8. Because they are partnered with MS.
7. Because they are racist against Native Americans.
6. Because they get some orgasmic thrill from spending money on slower, inferior products and services.
5. Because the same reason they use Hotmail over Gmail.
6. Because they are really using Apache... but configure it to report itself as IIS to confuse attackers.
5. Because they are originally from another dimension where IIS works better than Apache.
4. Because they were playing a practical joke on their users and then died suddenly.
3. Because they are brainwashed from listening to too many Steve Balmer speeches.
2. Because really all those IIS servers out there are just Microsoft's own servers trying to keep MSN.com running.
1. Because they smoke a lot of crack.