The web site for the FreeBSD operating system has been offline today. The outage for freebsd.org, which lasted approximately 20 hours, was caused by a hardware failure, according to representatives of the FreeBSD team.

A dynamically updating chart can be found here.

The freebsd.org site is hosted with Yahoo, which is the largest user of FreeBSD among hosting companies, with more than 261k active sites. FreeBSD has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003. 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.