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New 'Beaver' web server has exactly ONE user outside China

And none of those in China show anything while they wait for government paperwork

Netcraft's monthly survey of web-facing computers has turned up an oddity: a new web server called “Beaver” that's used by exactly one web site outside China.

“Just over a million sites now exhibit the Beaver Server header, and these make use of more than 110,000 unique domain names – mostly under the .cn top-level domain,” Netcraft writes. “ Only a single Beaver site is hosted outside of China – this solitary instance is hosted in Japan, at Amazon's Tokyo AWS region.”

Most Beaver-using sites are hosted by Aliyun, Netcraft writes, with the rest running on other Chinese hosts. Wherever they are they're all producing the following message and nothing but:

According to the filing requirements of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the website is accessible only if the ICP information is accurate and the ICP license is filed".

Netcraft reckons that message indicates that means the sites are yet to receive operating licences from the Ministry.

Which just leaves the question of Beaver's origins. Netcraft thinks it is “possibly an application based on Microsoft's HTTP Server API (HTTPAPI 2.0). This API lets C/C++ programmers receive HTTP requests and send responses without using Microsoft IIS. At least 38 million other websites also use HTTPAPI 2.0.”

Netcraft's survey also reports that some 100 million spam sites lurking on AWS disappeared last month, putting a nasty 30 per cent dent in nginx's hostname count along the way. The server remains the second-most-used code on active sites with 20.22 per cent share, rather behind Apache's 45.16 per cent. Microsoft's IIS has 7.83 per cent share, a sliver ahead of Google's 7.10 per cent. ®

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