The US Air Force has moved its most public site away from the Defense Technical Information Center to a commercial hosting datacenter at Cable & Wireless. Microsoft will be delighted to have replaced Sun as the server platform. In 1999 Microsoft suffered the indignity of the main US Army web site operations staff not only replacing Microsoft servers with Macs but also giving their opinion of Microsoft product security on the front page of www.army.mil.

However, Cable & Wireless have subsequently announced their intention to sell or close their US datacenters, which may mean that www.af.mil will move again. Since this was not completely unexpected, it makes the timing of the US Army's move seem curious.

The Netcraft Web Server Survey is a survey of Web Server software usage on Internet connected computers. We collect and collate as many hostnames providing an http service as we can find, and systematically poll each one with an HTTP request for the server name.

In the May 2003 survey we received responses from 40,444,778 sites.

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - May 2003

Top Developers

Developer	April 2003	Percent	May 2003	Percent	Change
Apache	25090844	62.57	25290478	62.53	-0.04
Microsoft	11007434	27.45	10989025	27.17	-0.28
Zeus	789324	1.97	780936	1.93	-0.04
SunONE	415999	1.04	420398	1.04	0.00

Some people expressed surprise that there could be thousands of sites running on Windows Server 2003 before it went on sale. The main reason for this is that some shared hosting providers who were part of the Windows Server 2003 beta program were prepared to run part of their sites on Windows Server 2003 prior to launch. The three providers with the largest number of active sites on Windows Server 2003 are all Microsoft Certified Partners while the fourth largest is Microsoft itself. No one else had more than 1000 active sites running on Windows Server 2003 at the start of May.

Top Microsoft Windows Server 2003 hosting companies by Active sites, May 2003 Company Active Sites   Interland 4,996   Schlund 3,125   Fasthosts 2,250   Microsoft 811

For comparison, Schlund and Interland [primarily due to its acquisition of Dialtone Internet] are also two of the largest Linux hosting providers, along with specialist Linux hosting providers Rackshack and Alabanza.

Top Linux hosting companies by Active sites, May 2003 Company Active Sites   Schlund 1,450,868   Rackshack 234,740   Alabanza 150,180   Interland 144,488   About 118,287   Valueweb 109,998   Verio 102,696

Ironically, Richard Stallman best known for the creation and relentless advocacy of the General Public Licence, has for many years run his own site using software produced under the more generous BSD licence. www.stallman.org switched from FreeBSD to Linux during April.

PC Magazine has awarded Netcraft a place in its 2003 Top 100 Classic Web Sites. Classic sites are defined as "perennial favorite, category leading sites", which one would most miss if stranded on a desert island.

PC Magazine is one of the world's leading computer publications with 6 million readers.