Skip to main content

What the Web’s most popular sites are running on

Apache serves the most pages
With Linux hosting comes the common use of the Apache web server. It’s by far the most deployed web server on the Internet with a 58.7% market share (Netcraft), so it’s only natural that it would also be used by a majority of the sites in the survey.
However, even though it’s the behemoth in the web server market, Apache is slowly losing ground to competing platforms such as Microsoft’s IIS and up-and-comers like Lighttpd, at least according to data from companies such as Port 80 and Netcraft.
MySQL dominates the databases
With open source ruling the game it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the database of choice for all but one of the sites is MySQL, the ultra-popular Swedish open-source database.
“The features that you get for free on MySQL, with replication, in-memory and fault-tolerant databases (if using MySQL cluster), transaction support, and the wicked performance, cost thousands of dollars with other database engines,” says Joseph Kottke, director of network operations at FeedBurner.
These sentiments are echoed by the other participants in the survey as well.
“We needed something proven, flexible and low-cost,” says Simon Yeo, director of operations at Meebo. (His alternative title is “ops guy.” Other laid-back titles at Meebo include “marketing dude,” “server chick,” and “Mr. Sparkle.”)
These sites are far from alone in favoring MySQL. According to the MySQL website it’s the fastest-growing database in the industry, with more than 10 million active installations and 50,000 daily downloads.
PHP rules server-side scripting
Just like Apache is the most common web server software, PHP rakes in another “win” for open source when it comes to server-side scripting languages. PHP has been the most popular server-side scripting language for years and will probably remain so for some time, despite the hype around Ruby on Rails and other frameworks and scripting languages that are growing in popularity.
How the survey was made
The seven participants all responded to a set of 28 survey questions (all responses available in the PDF matrix) plus a number of follow-up questions about their website infrastructure where they could further explain their choices.
Pingdom Infrastructure Survey

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Survey says: PHP passes Microsoft Active Server Pages

By JT Smith on June 11, 2002 (8:00:00 AM) With a faltering economy forcing companies to cut spending whenever possible, less expensive and freely available Open Source software solutions may be gaining in popularity. Those wanting proof can look no further to PHP taking the top server-side scripting spot in a recent Internet host survey. In April 2002, Netcraft's monthly Web server survey revealed that 24 percent, or around 9 million of the 37 million sites it surveyed, were using Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) for a server side scripting language. For the first time, an Open Source scripting solution had passed Microsoft's proprietary Active Server Pages scripting to claim the top spot on the Netcraft survey. For both the April and May Netcraft surveys, PHP and ASP were almost too close to call, with Microsoft's product offering coming in just a hair under 24 percent of all hosts running a server-side script

PHP Code Review Guidelines

General  The code works  The code is easy to understand  Follows coding conventions  Names are simple and if possible short  Names are spelt correctly  Names contain units where applicable  There are no usages of magic numbers  No hard coded constants that could possibly change in the future  All variables are in the smallest scope possible  There is no commented out code  There is no dead code (inaccessible at Runtime)  No code that can be replaced with library functions  Variables are not accidentally used with null values  Variables are immutable where possible  Code is not repeated or duplicated  There is an else block for every if clause even if it is empty  No complex/long boolean expressions  No negatively named boolean variables  No empty blocks of code  Ideal data structures are used  Constructors do not accept null/none values  Catch clauses are fine grained and catch specific exceptions  Exceptions are not eaten if caught, unless explicitly documente

Security: Password Hashing

In this article I'm going to cover password hashing, a subject which is often poorly understood by newer developers. Recently I've been asked to look at several web applications which all had the same security issue - user profiles stored in a database with plain text passwords. Password hashing is a way of encrypting a password before it's stored so that if your database gets into the wrong hands, the damage is limited. Hashing is nothing new - it's been in use in Unix system password files since long before my time, and quite probably in other systems long before that. In this article I'll explain what a hash is, why you want to use them instead of storing real passwords in your applications, and give you some examples of how to implement password hashing in PHP and MySQL. Foreword As you read on you'll see that I advocate the use of a hashing algorithm called Secure Hashing Algorithm 1 (or SHA-1). Since I wrote this article, a team of researcher