The September 2000 Netcraft Web Server Survey is out;


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




- Top placed developers with numbers of hosts responding and percentage share -
                                                                               
         Developer August 2000 Percent September 2000  Percent Change          
         Apache       12222228   61.66        12705194   60.02  -1.64          
         Microsoft     3890905   19.63         4140977   19.56  -0.07          
         iPlanet       1431425    7.22         1514106    7.15  -0.07          

                                                                               
- Top placed servers with numbers of hosts responding and percentage share -
                                                                               
                                  Top Servers                                  
                                                                               
           Server        August 2000 Percent September 2000 Percent Change     
     Apache                 12222228   61.66       12705194   60.02  -1.64     
     Microsoft-IIS           3888590   19.62        4138551   19.55  -0.07     
     Netscape-Enterprise     1389991    7.01        1472689    6.96  -0.05     
     Zeus                     396637    2.00         606987    2.87   0.87     
     WebLogic                 484980    2.45         566509    2.68   0.23     
     Rapidsite                317198    1.60         332246    1.57  -0.03     
     AOLserver                   540    0.00         201471    0.95   0.95     
     thttpd                   222282    1.12         190371    0.90  -0.22     
     WebSitePro               102185    0.52         103617    0.49  -0.03     
     WebSTAR                   90450    0.46          93185    0.44  -0.02     
                                                                               

                                 Active Sites                                  
                                                                               
         Developer August 2000 Percent September 2000  Percent Change          
         Apache        5049948   59.61         5334435   60.31   0.70          
         Microsoft     2225709   26.27         2363044   26.72   0.45          
         iPlanet        249275    2.94          256092    2.90  -0.04          
                                                                               
                                                                               
   
  Around the Net
  
   For the third month in a row there was strong growth in sites run
   using web servers outside of the traditional big three of Apache,
   Microsoft, and Netscape. There are now over half a million sites at
   [1]NetZero which provides a free .com domain and web hosting service,
   based on WebLogic's server. [2]Zeus continued its own strong growth,
   and is now running on over 600,000 sites, while [3]mydomain.com has
   switched to using AOLserver to provide domain name registration, DNS
   management facilities and hosting for around 200,000 domains.
   
    Dedicated Server business growing very quickly
    
   Over the last year the dedicated server business has progressed from
   an innovative niche to become the sector that everyone wants to be in.
   The combination of good quality networks, efficient and convenient
   provisioning, and cheap pricing has proved irresistible to many medium
   sized sites that previously hosted their sites on their own networks,
   with simple colocation facilities, or on higher end shared hosting
   systems. Many of leading companies in this sector are relatively new
   and unfamilar names, with the first and second generation companies
   such as [4]uu.net, [5]psi.com and [6]exodus.net having missed the
   initial surge of interest in the sector.
   
   Leading companies include [7]rackspace.com, [8]Digital Nation, a
   Verio subsiduary, [9]Interland, [10]Interliant, [11]DialToneInternet,
   [12]CrystalTech, and Dell subsiduary [13]dellhost.com. The typical model
   is to offer primarily Intel based hardware running either Red Hat
   Linux or Windows 2000, with pricing schemes often starting as low as
   $200 per month for a moderate specification machine and low bandwidth.
   This is seen as an attractive business model by hosting companies, as
   there is limited revenue in shared hosting, while dedicated server
   customers may typically generate in the region of $4K-$24K per annum.
   Customers gain the control and flexibility of having their own machine,
   and the convenience of not needing to deal with hardware purchase,
   shipment and upgrades themselves.
   
   Many of the dedicated server companies are showing outstanding growth,
   with rackspace.com having gone from 700 to over 2000 machines in a
   little over six months, and [14]Interland having over 12,000 Windows
   2000 sites just six months after the Windows 2000 launch. DellHost is
   also growing quickly, presumably by leveraging its parent company's
   customer base. Its [15]customer signup page shows how acceptable Linux
   has become, with Red Hat, rather than NT or Windows 2000, the
   default install. However, on the sites we find at dellhost.com 
   Windows 2000 leads Red Hat by 2:1, indicating the nature of Dell's 
   primary customer base.
   
   Although the dedicated server companies are growing revenue very
   quickly, the primary beneficiaries may be their suppliers. Intel based
   hardware vendors will make more money by selling multiple machines to
   dedicated server companies, while Microsoft benefits strongly from the
   greater number of software licences sold.
   
    Sun buys Cobalt
    
   Arguably the company that has gained most from the trend to dedicated
   servers is [16]Cobalt. Symmetrically, Sun, whose larger machines had
   been favoured by shared hosting providers, loses. In this context
   Sun's purchase of Cobalt ranks as an extremely sensible move, though
   it may become very hard for Cobalt to continue to envangelise the
   Linux environment with Sun as a parent company.
   
    Equifax goes past 1000 SSL sites
    
   When [17]Verisign bought [18]Thawte shortly before last Christmas it
   gained such a dominating position in the SSL certificate market that
   many wondered whether anyone would attempt to challenge its position,
   given that it held in excess of 99% of the issued SSL server
   certificates. [19]Equifax has risen to the challenge, and has adopted
   a similar strategy to that orginally proven by Thawte, making sure
   that it is by far the cheapest provider in the market. During the last
   year it has sold server certificates as cheaply as $45 per site, and
   our SSL Survey found more than 1000 sites using Equifax certificates
   this month, giving it around a 1% share. of the internet SSL
   certificate market. Verisign businesses still hold 98%, however.
   
  Dogfood
  
    HotMail
    
   We were premature with last month's comment to the effect that Windows
   2000 had replaced FreeBSD at HotMail. Markus Senoner was first to
   point out that although [20]www.hotmail.com is indeed running Windows
   2000, several of the other HotMail [21]front end servers are still
   running FreeBSD.
   
    amazon.com adopts Linux ...
    
   Also last month we pointed out that [22]www.amazon.com was serving a
   "powered by HP" logo from a Digital Unix machine. This month Amazon
   has introduced Linux into its load balanced pool. Over the last week,
   some 43% of requests have been served from Linux.
   
    ... but andover.net prefers Solaris
    
   One of the most frequently queried hosts of late on our server query
   form recently has been [23]www.andover.net Andover owns the Linux news
   site [24]www.slashdot.org and is itself a subsiduary of leading Linux
   hardware vendor [25]www.valinux.com so people are often surprised to
   see it running Solaris.
   

References

  1. http://www.netzero.com/
  2. http://www.zeus.com/
  3. http://www.mydomain.com/
  4. http://www.uu.net/
  5. http://www.psi.com/
  6. http://www.exodus.net/
  7. http://www.rackspace.com/
  8. http://www.dn.net/
  9. http://www.interland.net/
  10. http://www.interliant.net/
  11. http://www.dialtoneinternet.net/
  12. http://www.crystaltech.com/
  13. http://www.dellhost.com/
  14. http://search.ft.com/search/multi/globalarchive.jsp?docId=000918006520&query=netcraft&resultsShown=20&resultsToRequest=100
  15. https://order.dellhost.com/order.htm
  16. http://www.cobalt.com/
  17. http://www.verisign.com/
  18. http://www.thawte.com/
  19. http://www.equifax.com/
  20. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.hotmail.com
  21. http://www.netcraft.com/?restriction=site+ends+with&host=hotmail.com&lookup=Wait..&position=limited
  22. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.amazon.com
  23. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.andover.net
  24. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.slashdot.org
  25. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.valinux.com