December 1997 Web Server Survey
1st December, 1997
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 December 1997 survey we received responses from 1,681,868 sites.
December Results
Top Developers
| Developer | Nov 97 | Percent | Dec 97 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 695283 | 44.74 | 753341 | 44.79 | 0.05 |
| Microsoft | 293122 | 18.86 | 365012 | 21.70 | 2.84 |
| Netscape | 172650 | 11.11 | 175859 | 10.46 | -0.65 |
| NCSA | 68719 | 4.42 | 68097 | 4.05 | -0.37 |
| O'Reilly | 44622 | 2.87 | 46496 | 2.76 | -0.11 |
Top Servers
| Server | Nov 97 | Percent | Dec 97 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 695283 | 44.74 | 753341 | 44.79 | 0.05 |
| Microsoft-IIS | 280917 | 18.08 | 351755 | 20.91 | 2.83 |
| Netscape-Enterprise | 82304 | 5.30 | 88616 | 5.27 | -0.03 |
| NCSA | 68719 | 4.42 | 68097 | 4.05 | -0.37 |
| Stronghold | 40276 | 2.59 | 41829 | 2.49 | -0.10 |
Netscape is the sum of sites running Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications.
Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS.
June 1997 Web Server Survey
1st June, 1997
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 June 1997 survey we received responses from 1,117,259 sites.
June Results
Top Developers
| Developer | May 97 | Percent | Jun 97 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 442272 | 42.36 | 489695 | 43.83 | 1.47 |
| Microsoft | 170279 | 16.31 | 186079 | 16.66 | 0.35 |
| Netscape | 126747 | 12.14 | 135387 | 12.12 | -0.02 |
| NCSA | 69899 | 6.69 | 68278 | 6.11 | -0.58 |
Top Servers
| Server | May 97 | Percent | Jun 97 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 442272 | 42.36 | 489695 | 43.83 | 1.47 |
| Microsoft-IIS | 149757 | 14.34 | 167759 | 15.02 | 0.68 |
| NCSA | 69899 | 6.69 | 68278 | 6.11 | -0.58 |
| Netscape-Enterprise | 43784 | 4.19 | 50423 | 4.51 | 0.32 |
| Netscape-Commerce | 35717 | 3.42 | 37359 | 3.34 | -0.08 |
| Netscape-Communications | 36798 | 3.52 | 36244 | 3.24 | -0.28 |
Netscape is the sum of sites running Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications.
Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS.
Netcraft finds Millionth Internet Web Site
3rd April, 1997
Netcraft today announced that its April Web Server Survey received responses from in excess of One Million internet web sites.
The Netcraft Web Server Survey is the primary empirical metric for the number of sites on the World Wide Web and the relative popularity of web server software on internet sites.
Since its inception, the number of sites found by the Survey has risen from 18,957 in August 1995 to 1,002,612 in the Survey which completed today. During this period, Netcraft's dataset has usually been the Internet's largest publicly searchable collection of web sites, with the one million sites currently available more than double the 475,000 sites claimed by Digital for its AltaVista search engine.
December 1996 Web Server Survey
1st December, 1996
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 December 1996 survey we received responses from 603,367 sites.
December Results
Servers with more than 20,000 sites
| Server | November Sites | December Sites | November % | December % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 214366 | 247419 | 40.76 | 41.00 |
| NCSA | 70293 | 76210 | 13.36 | 12.63 |
| Microsoft-IIS | 29613 | 40466 | 5.63 | 6.71 |
| Netscape-Communications | 28887 | 30644 | 5.49 | 5.08 |
| Netscape-Commerce | 28093 | 30208 | 5.34 | 5.01 |
| CERN | 23160 | 21651 | 4.40 | 3.59 |
Developers with more than 20,000 sites
| Developer | November Sites | December Sites | November % | December % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 214366 | 247419 | 40.76 | 41.00 |
| Netscape | 72299 | 78256 | 13.75 | 12.96 |
| NCSA | 70293 | 76210 | 13.36 | 12.63 |
| Microsoft | 49266 | 58954 | 9.37 | 9.52 |
| O'Reilly | 20521 | 22753 | 3.90 | 3.77 |
| CERN | 23160 | 21651 | 4.40 | 3.59 |
Netscape is the sum of sites running Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications.
Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS.
O'Reilly is the sum of sites running WebSite & WebSitePro.
The first year August 1995 - August 1996
1st August, 1996
The first Netcraft Web Server Survey was done over the last weekend in July 1995. It had responses from 18,957 hosts. NCSA was then by far the most commonly used server with 57% of the responses, followed by CERN with 20%. When the survey went public, the first people to access the site were the Apache developers, just four months into their project, who were euphoric to find that 658 sites were using their software. These days the number of Apache sites is comfortably into six figures and their most likely source of competition is Microsoft, rather than the other freely available Unix servers.
The growth of the survey
The growth in the number of sites from 18,957 a year ago to todays 342,081 partly reflects the natural growth in the number of sites, and partly that we have got better at finding them. The eighteen fold rise in the number of hosts in the Web Server Survey over the year compares with a doubling in the number of internet domains found by Network Wizards in the six month period between July 1995 & January 1996. Network Wizards are due to report their July 1996 results shortly; presumably the number of domains will be considerably up on the 240,000 reported for January, as from our own research, in mid July there were 420,000 domains in .com alone.
The size of the survey
With over 342,000 hostnames, the Netcraft Web Server Survey is probably the world's largest collection of web sites; the closest published figure that we have seen is the 275,600 hostnames claimed by Digital for its AltaVista database. Until May 1996 we allowed robots full access to the survey, and so by definition, if we had details of a site, then the search engines had the urls too. Eventually, the files containing the urls to sites running the most popular servers became so big that they were only taken by robots, and so we stopped publishing report files that were more than half a megabyte in size. Since then we seem to have outstripped AltaVista in the quest to find more sites, though this could change; as far as we know our methods are completely different from AltaVista's, and there's no 'right' way to do it.