A web server consists of several components – the operating system (e.g. Linux), the web server (e.g. Apache) and the programming language (e.g. PHP). There are a variety of combinations of these that occur on websites across the web. We analyzed the top four million domain names and the technologies that they use and in this post, we will summarize the data with charts. The most common configuration of a website is Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP which is also called LAMP.
Operating System Market Share
As the above bar chart shows, most websites just say Linux (or Unix) instead of a specific flavor of Linux. The following table summarizes this data:
| Logo | Operating System | Percentage Market Share |
 |
Linux | 46.3% |
 |
CentOS | 16.6% |
 |
RedHat | 10.9% |
 |
Ubuntu | 9% |
 |
Debian | 7.67% |
 |
Fedora | 3.51% |
 |
FreeBSD | 2.06% |
 |
OVH | 1.64% |
 |
Win32 | 1.27% |
 |
SUSE | 1.05% |
Note that except FreeBSD and Win32, all are flavors of Linux. Among the types of Linux, CentOS is the most popular one, followed by RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and SUSE.
Web Server Market Share
Apache and Microsoft IIS are the leading web servers followed by Nginx.
All of these servers are very scalable and are used by several major companies.
- YouTube, Wikipedia and eBay use Apache.
- Pinterest, WordPress and About.com use Nginx.
- IIS is used by several Microsoft websites like Microsoft.com, Bing and is also used by Go.com.
Programming Languages Market Share
PHP is the most popular programming language followed by Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP). Java (or JSP or Servlets) is used by 0.4% of websites. Other programming languages that a small fraction of websites use are Perl, Python, C++, and Ruby.
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