April 2003 Web Server Survey
13th April, 2003
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 April 2003 survey we received responses from 40,100,739 sites.
Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - April 2003
Top Developers
| Developer | March 2003 | Percent | April 2003 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 24486857 | 62.51 | 25090844 | 62.57 | 0.06 |
| Microsoft | 10748795 | 27.44 | 11007434 | 27.45 | 0.01 |
| Zeus | 794940 | 2.03 | 789324 | 1.97 | -0.06 |
| SunONE | 419120 | 1.07 | 415999 | 1.04 | -0.03 |
Java Servlet Engines
10th April, 2003
Although JSP has a tiny fraction of the installed base of PHP and ASP, and numbers of specialist servlet web servers are completely dwarfed by Apache and Microsoft-IIS, Java related technology has a much bigger impact on the Web than the raw site numbers suggest. Over the last year JSP has been the fastest growing scripting technology after ASP.NET. JSP sites are often bigger, more complex, and better funded and run by larger organisations than sites using the more common scripting technologies.
The higher investment on these sites makes them attractive targets for hosting and site development companies, while the relatively large number of players in the application server market means that they are likely recipients of competitive upgrade offers. With Windows 2003 launching later on this month and providing some application server functionality out of the box, it is also likely that Java based sites will be strenuously encouraged to evaluate the .Net Framework.
Tracking sites using Java based application servers is not straightforward, and often requires inspection of the site content. In particular, sites using Microsoft-IIS or Netscape-Enterprise as a web server may be running servlet engines that do not provide a signature in the HTTP server header and tracking these servers has to be done through analysis of the site content.
With the proviso that a better and more accurate view can be had by taking more content from the site, and that sites using Servlet Engines with Apache, Microsoft and SunONE web servers would be not be included by this view, it is still possible to take a quick and simple view of what is going on from the HTTP server headers.
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From the table, Resin, Tomcat, IBM and Oracle are popular choices for those websites that support Java-based web applications. This is not an exhaustive list of servlet engines - for example some older engines, such as Apache JServ, still have a wide presence across the net, but are now deprecated in favour of newer implementations. (*) The high ratio of sites per address for JRun are caused by two hosts that support many thousands of sites. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
March 2003 Web Server Survey
25th March, 2003
In the March 2003 survey we received responses from 39,174,349 sites.
Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - March 2003
Top Developers
| Developer | February 2003 | Percent | March 2003 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 22492327 | 62.72 | 244 86857 | 62.51 | -0.21 |
| Microsoft | 9687454 | 27.01 | 1 0748795 | 27.44 | 0.43 |
| Zeus | 768951 | 2.14 | 794940 | 2.03 | -0.11 |
| SunONE | 428004 | 1.19 | 419120 | 1.07 | -0.12 |
Windows 2000 passes the million mark
25th March, 2003
Windows 2000 goes past one million IP addresses for the first time this month. Including sites running NT4 and Windows 2003, there are slightly over 1.5 million internet web sites running a Microsoft operating system.
Three quarters of Microsoft-IIS sites have WebDAV enabled
18th March, 2003
On 17th March Microsoft issued a security alert regarding a buffer overflow vulnerability which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on Windows 2000 machines. The vulnerability is triggered by the Microsoft-IIS/5.0 implementation of the World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol and is specific to Microsoft-IIS/5.0 - WebDAV was not supported in Microsoft-IIS/4.0, and Microsoft-IIS/6.0 is reported to be unaffected.
Microsoft-IIS/5.0 runs about 9 million web sites on just over 1 million ip addresses, making it the most widely deployed web server that has WebDAV enabled by default. Many sites disable WebDAV: best practice dictates that features that are not used should be disabled, and the IIS Lockdown tool recommended by Microsoft can disable WebDAV. However, although the number of sites that have disabled WebDAV is significant, our own data indicates that around three quarters of Microsoft-IIS/5.0 servers have WebDAV enabled, implying that at the time of announcement there were over 6 million vulnerable web sites.
The actual vulnerability occurs in a system DLL called by the WebDAV component, not in the WebDAV support itself. There may be ways to exploit this vulnerability via other components, or even other products. There is believed to be an exploit already in the wild for this vulnerability, and Windows 2000 administrators should apply the patch as soon as possible. CERT have issued an advisory (CA-2003-09), and Microsoft have issued a patch (see bulletin MS03-007).
The patch requires a reboot to become effective, and we have noticed that over half of the Microsoft-IIS/5.0 servers on the internet were rebooted during a two day period after the annoucement. The number of sites rebooting sets a lower bound on the uptake of the patch [a reboot is necessary as part of the patch installation] but will overstate the number of patched systems, as some sites will have rebooted for other reasons.
February 2003 Web Server Survey
25th February, 2003
In the February 2003 survey we received responses from 35,863,952 sites.
Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - February 2003
Top Developers
| Developer | January 2003 | Percent | February 2003 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 22,045,420 | 62.23 | 22,492,327 | 62.72 | 0.49 |
| Microsoft | 9,739,590 | 27.49 | 9,687,454 | 27.01 | -0.48 |
| Zeus | 736,744 | 2.08 | 768,951 | 2.14 | 0.06 |
| SunONE | 471,942 | 1.33 | 428,004 | 1.19 | -0.14 |