My Web Server Survey

I got curious about accuracy of the oft-cited Netcraft Web server survey. In particular, I wanted to know how accurate were their claims about the ``market share'' of various Web servers.

So I ran my own experiment. Over a period of about two weeks, from 1998 Aug 16 to 1998 Aug 29, I polled exactly 10,000 randomly selected hosts. Hostnames were gathered from a variety of random sources (mainly Yahoo!), and a custom-written script asked each host what Web server it ran.

Executive Summary

Category	Number	Percentage (My Survey)	Percentage (Netcraft's Survey)
Apache	4838	48.38	50.35
Microsoft	1333	13.33	22.69
Netscape	1273	12.73	8.22

As we can see, my survey results show that Apache powers about half of the surveyed hosts, while Microsoft and Netscape battle for a distant second place.

Discussion and Areas for Further Investigation

While my computed figure of 48.38% for Apache agrees well with Netcraft's figure of 50.35% (all figures are at the time of writing), there's a marked difference between Netcraft's and my reported share for Microsoft and Netscape. My results show these bitter rivals to be neck and neck at about 13% apiece, but Netcraft gives Microsoft 22.69% of the server market, Netscape merely 8.22%.

Now, I don't claim that my figures are more accurate than Netcraft's. For one thing, Netcraft surveys 2.8 million hosts, a far cry from my mere 10,000. Even so, I'm surprised by the large disparity between their figures and mine.

Consequently, I'm making my software available upon request to any intrepid soul who wants to run a similar survey of his own. Maybe additional independent results will help to paint a truer picture of this landscape. In order to run this software, you will need the following:

1. A Unix or Unix-like OS, such as Linux.
2. The bash shell.
3. A recent version of Perl.

Meanwhile, the raw results from my survey are available in two files, both in gzipped text format. These files are each 370KB uncompressed.

• The first file maps Web servers to hostnames (80KB compressed).
• The second file maps hostnames to Web servers (87KB compressed).

The results are summarized in the following table:

Category	Number	Percentage
Apache	4838	48.38
Microsoft	1333	13.33
Netscape	1273	12.73
(Unknown)	493	4.93
(No reply)	474	4.74
Lotus	232	2.32
NCSA	230	2.30
ORA WebSite/Pro	189	1.89
WebSTAR	138	1.38
Rapidsite	135	1.35
CERN	92	0.92
IBM	86	0.86
BESTWWWD	72	0.72
Oracle	52	0.52
OMSW	51	0.51
(Other)	46	0.46
OS	27	0.27
ISERVER	24	0.24
Roxen	23	0.23
AOL NaviServer	18	0.18
ORA WN	18	0.18
Purveyor	16	0.16
Zeus	14	0.14
Ashurbanipal	11	0.11
Worldgroup	11	0.11
Commerce Builder	10	0.10
GoSite-SS	9	0.09
(Error message)	7	0.07
JavaWebServer	6	0.06
SWS	6	0.06
Mini-Proxy	5	0.05
Spinner	5	0.05
GoServe	4	0.04
Hyperwave	4	0.04
MacHTTP	4	0.04
thttp	4	0.04
CommerceServer	3	0.03
EnterpriseWeb	3	0.03
GN	3	0.03
HTTPS	3	0.03
Spry	3	0.03
phttpd	3	0.03
AV	2	0.02
AWS	2	0.02
Alibaba	2	0.02
AutoTown	2	0.02
Columbus	2	0.02
Cougar	2	0.02
Hyperlink Dynamo	2	0.02
Netsite	2	0.02
Raptor	2	0.02
Tcl Webserver	2	0.02
ZBServer	2	0.02
Total	10000	100.00

I welcome any corrections or comments via email.