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The Web is powered by many different kinds of HTTP servers. Everyone seems to have a good sense that most of these are Unix servers, but what exactly is going on? Which servers have the most market share? What operating system platforms are most heavily used as servers?
To answer these questions, we did a survey. The pie chart below summarizes the overall distribution of the different kinds of HTTP servers that we found.
These data were collected as part of a normal WebCrawler indexing run and are based on information from 42,579 HTTP servers during the week of September 4, 1995.
A quick analysis of the data lends credence to the hypothesis that most of the servers on the Web run on Unix-based systems. In fact, that is true! About 83% of the servers run on Unix-based systems. The remaining servers are split among Mac, PC, and other platforms. The Mac's showing is surprisingly strong: nearly 9% of the servers run on the Macintosh. The PC, on the other hand, had a dismal representation as a Web server: around 7% of the Web servers ran on either Windows, Netware, NT, or OS/2. Come to think of it, who would want to run Windows, anyway?
Mirroring the situation in the browser market, most of the servers on the Web are free servers. 82% of the servers are free or proprietary servers. Most of these run on Unix, but not all do. Of the commercial vendors, WebSTAR and Netscape are the most widely adopted. The strong showing of the free software is a testament to its speed, reliability and simplicity. In particular, the most recent release of the Apache server shows a lot of promise.
Several other surveys of HTTP servers have been done recently. Fortunately, we all pretty much agree! Two notable examples are Paul Hoffman's Web Servers Comparison and NetCraft's Web Server Survey.
If you would like to include this figures in a report, please reference the WebCrawler as the source.
Copyright © 1995, America Online, Inc.