Last December we reported that the number of JSP sites had grown quickly during 2002, albeit from a small starting point. Reviewing the growth over the past year since July 2002, JSP continues to enjoy fast growth with a 94% increase in ip addresses running JSP based sites to over 44,000 ip addresses running some 105,000 active sites.

More surprising is the composition of these sites choice of operating systems. One might expect that by far the most common operating system amongst JSP based sites would be Solaris, given JSP's links with application servers such as Weblogic, IBM Websphere, Oracle, and Apache Tomcat. However, Solaris is only placed 3rd with 17% behind Linux with 40% and Windows with 26%.

It’s hard to predict what Sun’s assessment of this might be – would they be delighted at JSP’s increasing adoption, establishing a bridgehead for Sun into Windows and Linux territory, or would they be shocked and appalled at the numbers of JSP sites not choosing Solaris as an operating system platform? Probably, they would verge towards the former interpretation on the basis that use of any of the company’s technologies has to be a good thing.

Netcraft can report deployment of a wide range of technologies on the internet, aggregated by hosting company, or analysing specific choices made by enterprises. Please contact us (sales@netcraft.com) for further information.

When we first reported on Windows Server 2003 we gave an indication on the numbers of sites that had been put up prior to the official launch. In the three months since the launch the number of active sites has increased by over 300% and now stands at 88,400.

Windows Server 2003 Growth - July 2003

Largest Microsoft Windows Server 2003 hosting companies by Active sites, July 2003 Company Active Sites   Myhosting.com 13,504   Fasthosts 11,978   AdvancedAccess 10,301   Interland 6,655   Internap 4,729   ViaWest 4,476   1&1 Internet 3,790

Over the past 3 months many new hosting providers have released Windows Server 2003 hosting packages. Myhosting.com is now the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and apparently has stopped offering Windows Server 2000 and Microsoft-IIS/5.0 to new customers, inisisting that they should run Microsoft-IIS/6.0.

Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in December 2002 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 43% (68K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (8K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from other operating systems.

Microsoft will take some considerable encouragement at the number of sites that have switched from Linux.

One of the clearest unbroken trends of the Web Server Survey has been the rise and rise of Intel based operating systems. Although nearly all of the public focus is geared around advocacy of Linux and Windows, there is a third Intel based operating system, which generates a tiny fraction of the publicity surrounding these operating systems, and has a much smaller user and developer community.

FreeBSD secured a strong foothold with the hosting and internet services communities at the genesis of the web and has anything but gone away. Indeed it is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey.

Hostnames and Active Sites running FreeBSD Jan 2002 - July 2003

Top FreeBSD Hosting Providers - July 2003 Hosting Provider Active Sites Yahoo 159,354 NTT/Verio 152,054 Infospace Inc 129,378 Datasync 100,103 Pair.com 72,626 Tierranet 41,811 Global Internet 39,365 Telus 38,525 Addr 38,310

The reason for this is FreeBSD’s deployment with the operators of shared hosting systems, where tens and even hundreds of thousands of sites are collectively administered as part of a single system. In this respect a relatively small number of people control the technology choices for an enormous number of people, many of whom have no idea what operating system they are using.

Several of the companies that pioneered and succeeded in shared hosting, including best.com, now part of Verio and Pair Networks based their businesses on FreeBSD. These companies have stayed with the operating system while developing hundreds of thousands of customer accounts. However, much of the surge in FreeBSD sites over the last year has been caused by the rampant growth of Yahoo!’s shared hosting offering.

To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system used by so many been administered by so few.

Netcraft measure and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites 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.

A summary showing the ten providers whose sites experienced the fewest failed requests and the fasest connection times during June is shown above. 31 of the 50 providers went through the month without suffering an outage.

(more...)

This year has been one of turmoil for FeaturePrice customers, with prolonged outages, and commercial issues which have prompted an investigation into the company by the local state attorney’s office.

At the end of May the company’s assets were purchased by altantic.net. However, news sites have struggled to keep up with events as they have continued to unfold. Most recently the company’s DNS has been directed at Yahoo! WebHosting, and it is not clear to outsiders who might be in control of the featureprice.com domain, though it is almost certainly not atlantic.net.

Although about a dozen different companies have placed competitive advertising on google to attract Featureprice customers' attention, as far as we can tell the major beneficiaries to date have been Verio, Rackspace and Rackshack and their resellers, with around 8,000 of Featureprice’s 40,000 sites moving in the month to mid June.

Movements of Featureprice Sites mid May - mid June

The table is taken from our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis which identifies movements of sites from one hosting provider to another. The analysis is updated monthly and is available to hosting companies on a company license basis.