Berk Ulsoy

There are some web sites providing reports on web server software usage in the internet. One of the most populer is Netcraft with their infamous web server survey. In this post, I would like to talk more about decisions made by highest traffic sites and countries rather than cumulative results.

I’ve collected the list of the top sites from Alexa. They provide a csv file ordered by ranking. Then I used a tiny script to collect Server header from top 15000 sites. After that, I used libgeo-ipfree-perl package to guess geographic location of sites. The numbers may not be exact but enough to give very strong idea.

There are some points that I should say:

• Geographical location has been found based on ip/country match. It may not be 100% correct
• Some sites does not include Server header and some of them just give incorrect information. (about 900 in total) It does not make the site more secure, and I do not think it will make any difference in percentages. It is possible to modify Server header in all important web server software
• Only for the Top 100, I used Netcraft for the information about missing 8 servers.
• Of course there are cache engines, other web servers and proxies but their numbers are just neglectable
• Apache-Coyote has also some usage but I omit to make graphs simpler. It does not have affect on the idea of this work
• The numbers in the charts are not percentages but the actual server numbers. For the country pie charts, I also omit unknown servers if there are many (not much indeed)
• For the countries, I only checked those who has at least 5 sites in Top 15000

Top 100 Sites

We see a clean win for Apache. This is the most important and marginal output. If you look at only Netcraft’s deployed server counts, Microsoft IIS seems only 15% behind Apache. However when we check the best of the best, the busiest web sites in the Internet, we see that Microsoft IIS is far behind Apache. Besides, nginx is only a few sites behind of IIS. The names of the sites running IIS are also notable:

www.live.com (Microsoft)
www.msn.com (Microsoft)
www.myspace.com
www.microsoft.com (Microsoft ..ehh)
www.doubleclick.com
www.go.com
www.conduit.com
espn.go.com

In the previous year, Google has changed their Apache server headers to GWS. GWS is a modified version of Apache and if we combine this number with plain Apache deployments, the difference increases.

Top 1000 Sites

We still have same aggressive percentage of Apache and its derivatives

Top 10000 Sites

As the number increases to 10000, Microsoft IIS gains some more points.

Top 15000 Sites

The scheme does not change very much. Even we include rather low traffic sites, the winner is Apache

Choices based on countries

It is also interesting to check which countries prefer which software. Although open source software dominates in the world, we can notice some local differences.

This is one of the most important graph since most of the high traffic web sites are originated from the US. Although IIS seems closing the gap in the world scale, Apache is certainly preferred much more than IIS in here.

The picture changes when we move to Europe. Finland, Norway, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria, Bulgaria, Romaina, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal seem to use only open source web server software in Top 15000. Some other notable countries are here:

Japan has also notable Apache usage:

Also, there are some countries which prefer Microsoft IIS over Apache and other open source solutions
Argentina, Chile, Bermuda, Egypt have only Microsoft based sites in Top 15000.

China is also an important Microsoft user although it has the highest rate for software piracy along with Russia and Thailand.

Here is Iran, where everything from US is considered to be demonic, except Microsoft. Business is business anyway..

And lastly, my own country Turkey

Conclusion

After all these, there is not much need for a conclusion but I will write anyway

• Open source platforms (mainly Linux) and Apache (with derivatives) are the most preferred combination for high traffic web sites.period.
• nginx performed relatively well and it is a rising star. In some countries, it is used more than Microsoft IIS
• Usage of Microsoft IIS increases as we move away from Top 100
• Free software in web services has well adopted in most European countries and United States
• Some countries develop technology and some consume it. It is noticable that, countries which are well-known for their technology leadership also prefer using Free Software in their busiest web services. Consumers lack vision, knowledge, qualified engineers and in my opinion, this affects the platform decision.