The December 2000 Netcraft Web Server Survey is out;

                   http://www.netcraft.com/survey/

- Top placed developers with numbers of hosts responding and percentage share -
                                                                               
        Developer  November 2000  Percent December 2000  Percent Change         
        Apache          14193854   59.69       15414726   60.04   0.35         
        Microsoft        4776220   20.09        5027023   19.58  -0.51         
        iPlanet          1643977    6.91        1722228    6.71  -0.20         
                                                                               
                                                                               
- Top placed servers with numbers of hosts responding and percentage share -
                                                                               
                                  Top Servers                                  
                                                                               
    Server               November 2000 Percent December 2000 Percent Change    
    Apache                    14193854   59.69      15414726   60.04   0.35    
    Microsoft-IIS              4774050   20.08       5025017   19.57  -0.51    
    Netscape-Enterprise        1605438    6.75       1682737    6.55  -0.20    
    WebLogic                    789953    3.32        890791    3.47   0.15    
    Zeus                        640386    2.69        676526    2.63  -0.06    
    Rapidsite                   347307    1.46        365807    1.42  -0.04    
    thttpd                      226867    0.95        321944    1.25   0.30    
    tigershark                  120213    0.51        139300    0.54   0.03    
    AOLserver                   136326    0.57        125513    0.49  -0.08    
    WebSitePro                  106618    0.45        110681    0.43  -0.02    
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                 Active Sites                                  
                                                                               
                                                                               
        Developer  November 2000  Percent December 2000  Percent Change         
        Apache           5770634   59.95        6218326   59.54  -0.41         
        Microsoft        2483691   25.80        2615133   25.04  -0.76         
        iPlanet           247976    2.58         278724    2.67   0.09      

   Around the Net
  
    Linux distribution trial of force
    
   Competition between the Linux distributions has been particularly
   fierce since the release of Red Hat 7.0, which has provoked a great
   deal of controversy, initially because the C compiler produces
   binaries incompatible with other Linux distributions. The argument has
   escalated to a point well beyond a difference of opinion over the
   technicalities, with part of the Linux community suggesting that Red
   Hat is using its leading position in the market to marginalise the
   other distributions, while Linus Torvalds [1]called Red Hat 7.0
   "idiotic", "broken", and "unusable as a development platform".
   
   It poses the question whether the Red Hat brand and market position is
   strong enough to withstand this kind of assault.
   
   On a crude count of Linux Apache sites found by Netcraft where the
   Apache signature has been branded by the Linux distribution company,
   Red Hat currently has 69%. SUSE and Debian are the closest challengers
   with 9% and 8% respectively on a worldwide basis, though SUSE is the
   leading distribution in German speaking countries. Critically, Red Hat
   is established as the standard install at most well known dedicated
   server companies and Linux hardware vendors, is the base distribution
   used by Cobalt, and has the best established retail channels in
   English speaking countries. If there is to be an impact on Red Hat's
   share of the Web, it may be the case that the volunteer Debian
   distribution is the most likely to gain in popularity and credibility,
   rather than the other commercial distributions.
   
    Dogfood
    
   Throughout most of the last year Apple has run [2]www.apple.com in a
   load balanced configuration consisting of a mixture of Solaris servers
   and Apple's own MacOS X. Until recently most of the requests have been
   served from the Solaris machines, but www.apple.com now seems to be
   running exclusively Apple's own operating system. Solaris is still run
   on quite a number of Apple's other [3]sites, however.
   
   Compaq has also switched to running its own operating system on its
   signature site. [4]www.compaq.com has switched to Apache on Compaq
   Tru 64 Unix. Compaq has run NT and Microsoft-IIS since 1996, but may
   feel that it is important to make a statement about Tru 64 Unix, in
   the wake of its most visible reference site, amazon.com switching to
   [5]Linux. Compaq seems to be using Tru 64/Apache as a reverse proxy
   in front of its existing deployment of NT machines, as the sites
   content is still produced using Microsoft technology.
   
   Another site being queried extensively at the moment is
   [6]www.walmart.com. This initially looks like a Microsoft-IIS server
   behind a Linux based reverse proxy. However, there has been strong
   speculation that Walmart is actually running Apache natively with the
   server signature hand edited to say "Microsoft-IIS/5.0". This seems
   quite possible, as on one day the server signature was reported as
   Microsoft-IIS/4.0 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.6.6 OpenSSL/0.9.5, and the site
   also offers the JServSessionId cookie commonly used by Apache JServ.
   

References

  1. http://x58.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN=705169495.1&mhitnum=1&CONTEXT=976973433.7
  2. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.apple.com
  3. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/hosted?netname=APPLE-WWNET,17.0.0.0,17.255.255.255&order=max
  4. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.compaq.com
  5. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.amazon.com
  6. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.walmart.com

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