Netcraft's July 2001 Web Survey

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 July 2001 survey we received responses from 31,299,592 sites.

Top Developers

Active Sites

iPlanet is the sum of sites running iPlanet-Enterprise, Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce and Netsite-Communications.

Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95 and Microsoft-PWS.

Around the Net

Microsoft gains around five and a half per cent of Web hosts this month, and almost two per cent of active sites. Primarily this is a result of two large US installations converting from Solaris. The large free hosting company, Namezero, hosted on the Exodus network, has migrated its front-end systems to Windows 2000, as has part of the Network Solutions domain registration system. Network Solutions has moved physically from Digex to Interland [where Microsoft held a minority interest, prior to the sale to Micron] as part of the process.

These large installations had previously been masking a general decline in Solaris share on the web, which is now down four percentage points over the last year. Additionally, the Network Solutions site was by far the largest Netscape-Enterprise installation in terms of numbers of hostnames, and one would expect that Netscape-Enterprise overall share will drop towards the 2-2.5 per cent it has in the active sites analysis over the next few months.

First .Net site spotted

This month's survey also found a site outside of microsoft.com offering Microsoft's .Net services. This is earlier than many people expected, however the site, www.empowered.com, is a
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Microsoft itself has several sites using .Net, including uddi.microsoft.com.

Pre-release of Windows .Net Server becoming widely deployed

There are already 600-700 sites running Microsoft-IIS/6.0 and Windows .Net Server, the operating system that will succeed Windows 2000 sometime next year.

Windows .Net Server has had little media attention relative to .Net, and there has been no prior reporting of the availability of a pre-release version, but the sites running the Windows .Net pre-release are spread over several countries.

Mark Shuttleworth set to venture into space

Conversely, something that has been very widely reported is that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Thawte Certificate Authority, is set to be the second space tourist. Mark sold Thawte to Verisign for $550 million in November 1999, and is expected to provide Verisign stockholders with an opportunity to see their money literally go up in smoke later on this year.

Internet commerce steadily growing, recession or not

Despite the failure of many Internet-based companies over the last year, there has been steady growth in the numbers of sites performing encrypted transactions over the internet.

Verisign recently reported that 87 per cent of SSL certificates expiring in the last quarter were renewed, while our own SSL Survey shows growth of around 50 per cent over a year ago.

The OECD recently produced a comparison of the growth in internet SSL servers with the most comparable Nasdaq industry indexes for a recent US Federal Reserve meeting. ®

• Charts and more can be found at Netcraft's survey site

Copyright ©2001, Netcraft.