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Posted to dev@httpd.apache.org by Eli Marmor <ma...@elmar.co.il> on 2000/02/15 15:55:55 UTC
Apache Hits all Time High (was: A Wired article)
Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:
> <http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34302,00.html?tw=wn20000214>
Nice, but the real (good) news is the following:
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The February 2000 Netcraft Web Server Survey is out;
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
Netcraft is recruiting for several new openings
http://www.netcraft.com/jobs/
Headlines
Web Server Survey goes past 10 million sites
Over a million new sites found
Apache hits all time high
Netscape rebrands as iPlanet
Windows 2000 has more sites at launch than HP-UX
compaq.com runs Solaris, Apache, Postfix
www.apple.com runs an Apple operating system once more
- Top placed developers with numbers of hosts responding and percentage share -
Developer February 2000 Percent Change
Apache 6482728 58.08 2.59
Microsoft 2447645 21.93 -0.99
iPlanet 867265 7.77 0.00
- Top placed servers with numbers of hosts responding and percentage share -
Server February 2000 Percent Change
Apache 6482728 58.08 2.59
Microsoft-IIS 2444172 21.90 -0.98
Netscape-Enterprise 820930 7.35 0.04
Zeus 228457 2.05 0.04
Rapidsite 211439 1.89 -0.02
thttpd 198310 1.78 -0.14
WebSitePro 90911 0.81 -0.06
Stronghold 81290 0.73 0.02
WebSTAR 70681 0.63 -0.04
mod_x-httpd-php3_script 58907 0.53 -0.08
Over a million new sites found this month
This month, the number of sites found by the web server survey
exceeded 10,000,000 rising by over a million from last month. Part of
this is the effect of the Christmas period and Year 2000 planning
which depressed the numbers of new sites during December. Even so, a
million new sites in a month seems a huge number; for comparison the
survey reached a million sites in total in [1]April 1997.
Apache hits all time high
Apache hit a new high this month, with some 58% of the internet's web
sites now running on Apache. Part of the gain came from [2]Planet
moving to Apache/1.3.11 from a locally modified and rebranded earlier
version of Apache with a customised server signature. Planet hosts
well over 100,000 sites including the UK's largest dialup ISP,
[3]Freeserve. The [4]Apache conference is to be held early next
month in Florida from 8-10th March.
Netscape rebrands as iPlanet
[5]Netscape recently contacted us and asked if their servers could be
grouped as iPlanet rather than Netscape, as that is now the brand that
the Sun-Netscape Alliance uses for server software products. The group
has also started replacing the Netscape name from web server
signatures, with iPlanet-WebServer-Enterprise/4.1 becoming the
successor to Netscape-Enterprise/4.0. In some ways it recognises the
end of an era, and a repositioning that has implicitly been in place
for several years moving the company from web server to electronic
commerce server. During 1995 Netscape was comfortably the company with
the most momentum on the internet, but its share of web sites peaked
in early 1996, as it conceded the volume hosting market to Apache, and
the self hosted sites market to Microsoft. Netscape's residual
strength, and that of Sun has been in high volume sites, and it's not
likely to be coincidental that iPlanet's web site is headed Ecommerce
Solutions rather than web servers.
One area that it is particularly strong in is brokerage sites, where
most of the leaders including [6]Schwab, [7]Etrade, and [8]Fidelity
all currently run Solaris and Netscape-Enterprise.
Vertical markets
Just as iPlanet is the favoured choice of leading brokerages, some
other industries also have polarised towards particular vendors. One
significant concentration is in internet retail, where Microsoft has
50% or more of both the [9]stores.org and [10]Media Metrix top 100
retail sites. One of the main reasons is likely to have been the
success of the Site Server product which has been widely adopted. Many
of Site Server's competitors chose to compete with Site Server on NT,
when a strategy of porting to Linux/Apache would have been more
appropriate. Providing internet retail facilities as a service rather
than as software has also fared better as a business model.
Apache's strong vertical market is the internet industry itself, where
the great majority of hosting companies run Apache, while one of the
more interesting vertical markets is banking, where a shift from
iPlanet to Microsoft seems to be taking place. If anyone can provide
us with an plausible empirical ordering of banking sites, we will
produce the results in the next survey report.
Notable Sites
One of our readers points out that [11]compaq.com currently runs
Solaris and Apache in preference to NT, Linux, FreeBSD, Digital Unix,
Guardian, or any other operating system available for hardware that
Compaq sells. compaq.com resolves to Compaq's MX host and runs Wietse
Venema's [12]Postfix SMTP server, with a http redirect to
[13]www.compaq.com. Development of Postfix was funded by [14]IBM, and
they may have mixed feelings about it being the most mission critical
piece of software in a direct competitor. IBM itself has stayed with
[15]sendmail on their MX hosts in spite of funding Postfix.
Leading encryption company [16]RSA, which has styled itself the most
trusted name in e-security, has had its web site successfully
compromised twice recently, and seems to have changed web server
platform on each occasion. On Thursday 10th February www.rsa.com was
running Solaris and Netscape-Enterprise, by Sunday 13th it had
switched to Linux and Apache/1.3.6, while today [Monday 14th February]
it is running NT4 and Microsoft-IIS/4.0. It would be interesting to
know the reasons for this; sometimes companies change platforms as a
knee jerk reaction to a security or reliability problem, but going
through the three most common platforms in four days seems exceptional.
Presumably at least one of the attacks was a redirection of the DNS
entry for www.rsa.com.
[17]www.apple.com has been running on Solaris and Netscape-Enterprise
for several years, but Apple is now introducing MacOS X Server and
Apache into the load balancing pool serving the site. At the moment
there is a 2:1 ratio of Solaris to MacOS X Server on repeated queries
to the site, but presumably Apple's intention will be to ultimately
replace the Sun platform with their own.
One frequently asked question is how the [18]www.buy.com site can be
running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Solaris. This is one of the scenarios
outlined in the [19]faq. Buy.com uses a reverse proxy, Inktomi
Traffic-Server/2.2 running on Solaris, to reduce the load on the
Windows 2000 web servers. and the tcp/ip characteristics that we see
are those of the Solaris reverse proxy rather than the web servers
sitting behind it.
Move to Windows 2000 underway
Although Windows 2000 does not launch until Thursday, many sites are
already in the migration process. One of the more interesting
scenarios has been at [20]www.dell.com which over the last month has
appeared to swap Windows 2000 machines into its load balancing pool
for periods of a few hours at a time, and then remove them, finally
deciding that it was safe to proceed on February 9th.
Other sites are mixing Windows 2000 systems in to their load balancing
pool on a consistent basis, increasing the share of Windows 2000
machines as they build up confidence. For example,
[21]www.alaskaairlines.com had a 4:1 ratio of NT4 systems to Windows
2000 last week, while this week it seems to be running an even number
of each.
One of the more telling statistics about Microsoft's commitment is
that at launch there will already be more web sites running Windows
2000 than [22]HP-UX. Each currently have around 20,000 sites, with
Windows 2000 gaining at a rate of around 1000 a week to date this
year.
The key to the rapid adoption of Windows 2000 will be whether
Microsoft can persuade the larger hosting companies to replace their
current platforms with it. With the technology for so many web sites
concentrated in the hands of a relatively few people and companies,
Microsoft could gain share very quickly if it is successful. On the
other hand, this is the group of people who have to date been most
resistant to Microsoft technology, and have been amongst the most
enthusiastic adopters of Linux, which has established a strong
momentum of its own.
References
1. http://www.netcraft.com/press/million.html
2. http://www.theplanet.net/
3. http://www.freeserve.net/
4. http://www.apachecon.com/
5. http://www.netscape.com/
6. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.schwab.com
7. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.etrade.com
8. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www400.fidelity.com
9. http://www.stores.org/
10. http://www.mediametrix.com/
11. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=compaq.com
12. http://www.postfix.org/
13. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.compaq.com
14. http://www.ibm.com/
15. http://www.sendmail.org/
16. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.rsa.com/
17. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.apple.com
18. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.buy.com
19. http://www.netcraft.com/os/accuracy.html
20. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.dell.com/
21. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.alaskaairlines.com/
22. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.hp.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SSL Server Survey - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A commercial SSL server survey is also available from Netcraft,
price pounds 1200 for a monthly updated analysis reflecting the
topology of encrypted transactions electronic commerce on the internet.
Details and sample pageset available at http://www.netcraft.com/ssl/
- - - - - - - - Commercial Internet Research from Netcraft - - - - - - - - -
Netcraft also does commercial internet research projects. These include
custom cuts on the Web Server Survey data, virtual hosting industry analysis,
corporate use of internet technology and bespoke projects. All of the data
is gathered through network exploration, not teleresearch.
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Mike
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Mike Prettejohn
mhp@@netcraft.com Phone +44 1225 447500 Fax +44 1225 448600
Netcraft Rockfield House Granville Road Bath BA1 9BQ England
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Eli Marmor
marmor@elmar.co.il
El-Mar Software Ltd.