May 1999 Netcraft Survey Results

Two servers on the ServerWatch Web Server List increased their market share from Apr to May (with Current Market Share and % Increase from April):

Server	May 99 Results	Market Share	Percent Increase
Apache	3,097,993	57.22	+1.03
Zeus	60,520	1.12	+0.09

For Apache this is the seventh straight month the server has increased its share and the first month it has surpassed 3 million sites.

In contrast, two servers had their market share fall significantly (at least .1%) from Apr to May (with Current Market Share and Percentage Decrease from April):

Server	May 99 Results	Market Share	Percent Decrease
NCSA	33,652	0.62	-0.20
Microsoft IIS	1,239,454	22.89	-0.20

For NCSA this is the seventh straight month the server has fallen significantly (in October of 1998 NCSA had a 2.08% market share; it's share now is 0.62%).

The following is a highlight of this month's results direct from Netcraft's Web site:

- Top placed developers with numbers of hosts responding and % share -

Developer	May 99	Percent	Change
Apache	3,097,993	57.22	+1.03
Microsoft	1,244,808	22.99	-0.21
Netscape	356,207	6.58	-0.20
O'Reilly	85,654	1.58	-0.10

- Top placed servers with numbers of hosts responding and % share -

Server	May 99	Percent	Change
Apache	3,097,993	57.22	+1.03
Microsoft-IIS	1,239,454	22.89	-0.20
Netscape Enterprise	266,449	4.92	-0.11
RapidSite	99,763	1.84	-0.04
WebSite Pro	80,670	1.49	-0.09

Apache has 3 million sites

This month sees Apache go past the 3 million sites mark. The widespread deployment of Apache amongst hosting companies and ISPs ensures that Apache is in a better position to echo the growth of the Web than any other server, and this has been a longterm theme of the Web Server survey.

At the start of 1998 Apache had only a small share of third party certified Internet SSL sites. Publicly trusted SSL sites are individually certified by a third party certificate authority such as Thawte or Verisign. The desire for security means that SSL sites are relatively more likely to be run from companies' own networks than hosted externally. The influence of the ISP and large scale hoster is therefore considerably reduced for SSL sites, and the much smaller number of Apache SSL sites reflected this, with the established reasoning being that the server was very much an internet industry tool, used by technically sophisticated specialists, rather than end user companies.

However, Apache is now the fastest growing server in our SSL Server Survey. Clearly something has happened over the last fifteen months, which has made the server attractive to people wishing to use encrypted transactions.

• Verisign announced that they were prepared to licence their certificates to Apache sites. Previously Apache was not an approved server, though some sites were prepared to run Apache SSL sites with Verisign certs without approval.
• Red Hat released an Apache server covered by an RSAREF licence. This made it possible for people in the United States to use Apache SSL sites without infringing the RSA patent, though some US sites were in any case prepared to use Apache for SSL without the benefit of an RSAREF licence, wagering that the likelihood of a patent infringement suit was low.
• Ralf Engelschall released mod_ssl. giving Web site administrators another technical option to consider for Apache enabled SSL, and this has quickly become popular.
• Apache is still gaining share with large companies, as wider publicity makes corporates more amenable to running the server. Large companies are more likely to be involved in electronic commerce and encrypted transactions.
• The increase in ecommerce facilities offered by hosting companies and ISPs looking for value added services, and the increasing use of Thawte's wildcard X.509 certificates. ISPs, hosting companies, and wildcard certificate users are user communities where Apache features most strongly.

All of which shows that Apache's overwhelming popularity in the relatively low value high volume hosting market does not necessarily preclude it from being useful in much lower volume and higher value applications.