We have recently added detection of Network Appliance’s Netcache devices to uptime.netcraft.com and the Web Server Survey.

Netcaches are reasonably expensive devices, and internet-wide we find only around a thousand in use as reverse proxies. However, one of these devices is at GoDaddy and serves content for in the region of 1.4 million template sites and redirects for domains registered by GoDaddy.

Many of the NetApp installations are well known and prestigious sites, including Nokia, Motorola, and Sony. Apple's mac.com and the US 8th Army in Korea are also users as is The Gap, where the Netcache is itself fronted by a Redline Network Accelerator.

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Both Apache and Microsoft have significant events scheduled during the next few weeks. Apachecon takes place November 16-19th in Las Vegas, and features tutorials and presentations by many of the Apache core team. Meanwhile, Microsoft has arranged a series of technical seminars at locations throughout Europe during October aimed at ISPs, hosting companies, and people running large scale Microsoft-IIS deployments.

Windows 2003 continues to increase in total hostname and active sites, with the number of active sites growing 109% to 185K since July 2003.

Largest Microsoft Windows Server 2003 hosting companies by Active sites, Sept 2003 Company Active Sites   Myhosting.com 32,810   Fasthosts 22,949   AdvancedAccess 10,439   Interland 8,066   1&1 Internet 6,027   InterNed Services 5,229   GMO 5,113   ViaWest 4,099

Myhosting.com continues to be the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and now has over 98% of their active sites migrated to Windows 2003.

Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in January 2003 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 49% (153K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (16.5K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from FreeBSD (3K) and 1% from Solaris (2.5K).

Notably, the number of sites switching from Linux has proportionately kept pace since July when many commentators thought the 5% of sites switched to Windows 2003 from Linux was an aberration.

Companies servicing the largest numbers of SSL sites, August 2003 Company SSL Sites uu.net 6,950 verio.net 4,243 ATT 4,019 Interland 3,946 Cable and Wireless 3,038 Qwest 2,908 Sprint 2,787

Self hosting is still a popular option for SSL site owners whose sites perform encrypted transactions and ecommerce. When counted by reverse DNS, the largest aggregations of SSL sites are on networks at companies whose main business is selling connectivity rather than hosting.

Of the top seven providers, only Interland is exclusively a hosting provider, although Verio is best known for hosting and all of the others have significant hosting operations. Interland's early focus on the mid-market and the Windows platform, which is favoured by many internet retail sites, has helped create its position as the leading hosting location for encrypted transactions.

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Although PHP is universally thought of as implying Linux, Apache and MySQL, nearly 7% of PHP sites [when counting by ip address] run on Windows. This has doubled over the last year, and on its current growth trajectory PHP will overtake Cold Fusion as the most popular non-Microsoft scripting language used on Windows during the next year.

IP Addresses on Windows Operating System

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