Certificate Authorities regard it as a badge of the trade to offer their main websites over SSL. However, John Airey points out that several CAs have not checked that the SSL versions of their sites can be used without generating errors. Verisign and Baltimore's sites both give warnings, and in some browsers so do Geotrust and Globalsign. This occurs because the sites include links to offsite images, but these images are only served over HTTP, causing browser warnings about insecure content when included on an SSL site. The point may seem small and obvious, but inconveniencing users by triggering warnings makes it more likely that they will turn off the warnings, which reduces their security.

Buying a dedicated server or moving a site to a new network provider can be a stab in the dark in that it is often not easy to see the quality and reliability of the provider’s network performance until after the purchase has been made.

Netcraft’s view is that lack of transparency on network performance and outages harms the whole industry, both consumers and providers.

Just as the customer suffers from not being able to make an informed choice between suppliers taking into consideration network response times as well as price, vendors with fast and reliable networks have no easy way of empirically showing the prospect the relative quality of service of their network relative to other players in the market.

Ignorance plays into the hands of the companies investing less in their networks, since they will be better able to discount, and their longer response times and network outages will be less obvious to the customer.

More widespread knowledge helps the industry as a whole, because better informed customers are more willing to pay more for superior connectivity, and the extra revenue coming into the industry can be invested in further improving resilience, performance, and support creating a virtuous circle.

Key metrics include;

• fewer outages – no one wants to be on a network that suffers frequent loss of connectivity.
• Shorter outages - customers will be more tolerant of short outages which may be operationally difficult to avoid;
• faster response times - the shorter the response times, the better.

Netcraft is measuring and making available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites to give an indication of the relative and absolute response times currently available in the industry. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from four separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

Using the performance of a hosting providers own site to determine the performance of the hosting companies network is only indicative. By default the sites are ranked in order of fewest failed requests, and shortest time to connect, in order to give the clearest indication of network capacity and congestion, with the least impact from the performance of the companies’ own web servers, though it is possible to sort by any column by clicking on the column heading.

If you are using the table as a guide when choosing where to locate a dedicated or collocated server, remember that connection times fluctuate continually, and only hundredths of a second separate the top companies. Avoiding companies showing prolonged outages is likely to be a better strategy than necessarily going for the company with the fastest connection time.

Factors other than network performance, including quality of support and price will also be important. If you are considering shared hosting then the load on the shared hosting system will likely be a greater constraint on the performance of your site than network connection time.

If you represent a hosting company and would like to be included in the table, or if you are researching prospective hosting locations and would like more detailed performance information please mail us.

It looks as if Schwab is starting to transition the schwab.com site to Linux. We first noticed Linux in use at www.schwab.com on 18th June, and currently two requests out of 10 are served from Linux.

Grant Wilson spotted Linux World making a curious contribution to Open Source Advocacy.

Cable & Wireless, which recently announced that it would sell or close its North American operations, suffered several hours of outages on its main web site earlier today. Ironically, the site is still hosted in the US, presumably by the very same operations that it is trying to divest.

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 June 2003 survey we received responses from 40,936,076 sites.

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

Top Developers

Developer	May 2003	Percent	June 2003	Percent	Change
Apache	25290478	62.53	25856505	63.16	0.63
Microsoft	10989025	27.17	10992195	26.85	-0.32
Zeus	780936	1.93	779982	1.91	-0.02
SunONE	420398	1.04	419968	1.03	-0.01

Comparisons of mean time between reboots on Linux and Solaris are very topical, as the two are often thrown head to head in cost benefit analysis of server platforms. It is interesting to review the uptimes of some of the internet's busier servers hosted at Sun, Google and Akamai. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how few reboots there are on the networks, given the amount of traffic they see, though in absolute numbers the average number of days between reboots is higher at Sun than either of the two Linux based companies.

Speedera, which recently announced that it has reached operating profitability, has seen some impressive site gains in the last few weeks. Sites starting to use the Speedera caching service include NASA, Hewlett Packed, AMD and the India Times.

With Cable and Wireless announcing that its Global division, which includes the Digital Island business, is to be sold or closed, Speedera will be hopeful of making further gains within the next few weeks.

www.digital.com was recently relegated to being a CName for www.hp.com, with the consequence that requests for www.digital.com now report the site as running HP-UX, a poignant moment for the company that brought the world RSX, VMS, and Ultrix.

Similarly, Netscape, whose founding employees pioneered the web server, replaced Netscape-Enterprise with AOLServer a few months ago.

www.army.mil has recently moved to MacOS X in its first switch since 1999, when it migrated to the Apple platform in the aftermath of a successful attack on its then Microsoft based web site. Ironically, Apple has recently replaced MacOS X with Solaris for its own Knowledge Base site.

The Washington Post has become of the first big name media sites to adopt Solaris 9. It is currently deployed in a load balancing pool where approximately a quarter of requests are met by Solaris 9 machines. To date, only a handful of Sun's own sites have been switched to Solaris 9.

One site that has not changed is www.sco.com, where people continue to delight in the irony of SCO using the operating system whose deployment they are seeking to restrict.

Rackshack had a large transformer explode and start a fire today. Amazingly, given the pictures of the fire they seem to have prevented it from affecting their network performance which, at least for rackshack's own site, is no different from any other day.