To analyse the web technology choices made by large enterprises Netcraft reviews the operating systems run on around 24,000 sites run by 1500 leading enterprises around the world, compiled from the Fortune 1000, the Financial Times European 500, and various FT regional lists.

Two months ago SCO sent letters to 1500 of the largest companies globally warning them of risks involved in running Linux. Although SCO did not make the identities of these companies public, Chris Sontag described the list as “the Fortune 500 and effectively the global 2000. It ended up being about 1,500 top international companies”. This makes it likely that the list of companies that received letters from SCO will be quite similar to the list of sites we use to study enterprises’ web site technology choices.

At the time many analysts speculated that SCO’s behaviour might deter enterprise companies from using Linux. However, this has not happened to date, at least in respect of their internet visible web sites. In the last two months Linux has made a net gain of over 100 enterprise sites; sites which have migrated to Linux including Royal Sun Alliance, Deutsche Bank, SunGard,T-online and most noteworthy, Schwab.

It may well be that although SCO has generated an enormous amount of attention from the media and the Linux evangelists, it does not presently have the attention of IT practitioners in large companies. Companies may be continuing with Linux migrations because they believe:

• The likelihood of a successful conclusion to SCO’s lawsuit is extremely small;
• The costs of migrating from Linux to FreeBSD at a later date are also small;
• They are committed to a migration strategy and don't intend to change course;

In practice we think that conventional competition from Windows and Solaris currently presents more of a barrier to Linux adoption in the Enterprises than SCO. Although Linux has enjoyed a net gain over the last two months, it is not by any means one way traffic; in the past twelve months over 1600 enterprise sites have changed operating system in one direction or another.

Enterprise sites moving off Linux include Valaro Energy and National Service Industries and Colt which have moved to Windows, while Cadbury Schweppes have appropriately adopted a suck it and see approach, trying all three operating systems on their main site in the space of the last two years, and currently on Windows 2000.

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.

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.

A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the year March 2002 to March 2003 is provided as an excerpt from our Hosting Provider Server Count. Companies are included in the filter if they started March 2002 with more than 600 servers, and finished March 2003 with at least 1000, and grew at a rate of 33% or better, year on year. This removes hosters which can show a significant percentage increase si1mply by virtue of being small at the start of the period.

Fastest Growing Hosting Providers by % Increase in Web Visible Servers March 2002 to March 2003 Parent Company Mar-02 Mar-03 % Change Main Business Area 1&1 Internet 1,448 8,811 +508% Mixed Hosting Rackshack 2,121 9,374 +342% Dedicated Time Warner Cable 659 1,611 +144% Broadband Host Europe 1,934 3,356 +74% Mixed Hosting Colt 1,332 2,243 +68% Telecoms Speakeasy 1,503 2,481 +65% Broadband Hurricane Electric 693 1,117 +61% Dedicated Inflow 696 1,086 +56% Application Hosting Rackspace 3,260 4,955 +52% Dedicated Datapipe 805 1,207 +50% Dedicated Easynet 718 1,057 +47% ISP Interland 4,906 6,947 +42% Mixed Hosting Korea Telecom 2,711 3,792 +40% Telecoms SBC Communications 2,190 3,055 +39% Telecoms Global Media Online(GMO) 1,044 1,427 +37% Mixed Hosting Telus 1,058 1,412 +33% ISP

Comparing with last quarter shows percentage growth down somewhat amongst the companies at the top of the list, although absolute growth in terms of servers is larger in this quarter. 17 companies, almost evenly spread between North America, Europe and the Far East grew servers by more than a third over the year.

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 July 2003 survey we received responses from 42,298,371 sites.

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

Top Developers

Developer	June 2003	Percent	July 2003	Percent	Change
Apache	25856505	63.16	26951879	63.72	0.56
Microsoft	10992195	26.85	10976342	25.95	-0.90
Zeus	779982	1.91	766943	1.81	-0.10
SunONE	419968	1.03	674571	1.59	0.56

SunONE's significant increase of 254,603 sites is primarily attributable to Network Solutions' migrating around a quarter of a million parked sites back to a Solaris platform. NSI originally ran its domain parking system on Solaris, but moved large numbers of parked domains to a Microsoft-IIS system hosted at Interland over a year ago. NSI still hosts a significant number of parked sites at Interland.

Although there are many forums where people solicit and receive customer experiences on hosting companies, arguably the essence of all these opinions is condensed into buying decisions that site owners make, firstly in deciding where to host their site, and later if they should move it to a different one.

Each day Netcraft contacts approximately 100,000 sites queried by users of our Whats that site running? form to determine the operating system, web server, hosting location, and time since last reboot. From these results we can show which sites have changed providers since last queried, and where sites queried for the first time are located.

This addition to the Netcraft pageset is updated hourly, showing the hosting locations which have gained the most sites over the previous 1,7, and 30 days periods. It is aimed at the individual web site owner who wants to see, at a glance, who in the hosting industry has momentum, identify companies that are respectively gaining and losing customers, and validate this by seeing which sites are moving to which hosting companies.

During June, the hosting company that gained most sites, net of any sites lost to competitors was Rackshack. Comite Gestor da Internet no Brasil shown as second is in fact the ip address registry for Brazil. So far as we know the Brazilian registry does not make ip address delegation information available, and so the ip address space controlled by that registry shows up in this table as if it was a single hosting location. In third place is the leading German hosting company, Schlund.

Particularly notable is the 1066 sites that Rackshack gained from competitors, over three times the number of the second most successful company, and that Rackshack's gains from competitor's outnumbered losses by two to one.

For a more comprehensive coverage of site losses and gains at the largest 1000 hosting companies on the internet, Netcraft produces a comprehensive internet-wide analysis based on the 40 Million web sites found by the web server survey.