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Microsoft
Windows has a significantly higher share of the
web when one counts by computer, rather than by host,
as in the conventional Web Server Survey.
The survey shows 49% of the computers running the web are Windows based;
a little more than all of the Unix-like operating systems combined.
As some of the 3.6% of computers not identified by Netcraft operating system detector
will in reality be Windows systems, it would be fair to say
about 50% of public Web Servers world-wide are run on Microsoft operating systems
Although
Apache
running
on various Unix systems runs more sites than Windows, Apache is heavily
deployed at hosting companies and ISPs who strive to run as many sites
as possible on a single computer to save costs.
Windows is most popular with end-user and self hosted sites,
where the host to computer ratio is much smaller.
Linux
is the second most commonly used operating system.
Linux has been consistently gaining share since this survey started,
but interestingly not significantly to Windows detriment.
Operating systems which have lost share have been Solaris and other
proprietary operating systems, and to a small degree BSD.
One could characterise this process as Solaris being continually chased
further and further up market by Intel based operating systems, with Sun
in turn progressively eliminating the other proprietary Unix operating
systems.
Intel enjoys both the benefits of the boom in freely available Unix software
and the ascent of Windows,
with competing processors correspondingly marginalised in
the web server market.
Sun would reasonably point out that this analysis simply counts the number
of computers rather than their cost, and that a K Intel machine
would count the same as a M E10K system, and that while Windows
matains its share in Fortune 500 companies, the relative position
between Linux and Solaris is approximately reversed in these companies.
The analysis also gives some quantification of the rate at which sites
migrate to Windows 2000 from NT.
In March 2001, a little over a
year after the introduction of the operating system 25% of the computers
running Microsoft operating systems are running Windows 2000.
