Netcraft News

> I never suggested removing a language used by millions of people. Let me be more specific: Pruning support for old formats and protocols is a feature, not a bug.

You're contradicting yourself here; Hebrew is a language used by millions of people (about ten million, so 99.9% of the world's population does not use it) and also an old format (about 3000 years old). "Pruning" support for old formats makes history inaccessible; "pruning" support for old protocols requires constant effort to keep your servers compatible with whatever is fashionable with today's cascade of attention-deficit teenagers [CADT].

And if we follow your originally stated reasoning, "Continuing to support $x means continuing to defend attack surface that's implemented as $y year-old code, to deliver a feature that in $z the majority of people do not use," we ineluctably arrive at the conclusion that we should remove support for languages used by millions of people.

Taken literally, we should remove support for all languages, since no language is used by more than 50% of the world population, but in keeping with the principle of charity, I interpreted your "majority" as "vast majority". I'm not sure where exactly the vast-majority cutoff lies: a feature that 90% of people do not use? That would include all natural languages except English and Chinese. 95%? All languages except those, Hindi, and Spanish. (In particular, it leaves out all those RTL languages that cause so much complication in text…

I didn't ask about NeXT, I asked about NetBSD. Surely if it ran 90% of the web, you can name a single website that was served by it.

Like, I honestly can't tell if this is some kind of bizarre troll. People keep asking you for sources for your incredible claims, and you just keep making them without a single reference. Where are you getting this 30M number? This 90% number?

Here's another source: Red Hat IPO'd in 1999 on the back of a Linux operating system, per Wikipedia, "achieving—at the time—the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street". Pretty amazing for something that was "barely a curiosity, a hobby".

Here's Netcraft in 2003, claiming a mere 2M sites running FreeBSD and describing it as a blip compared to Linux and Windows.

> Although nearly all of the public focus is geared around advocacy of Linux and Windows, there is a third Intel based operating system, which generates a tiny fraction of the publicity surrounding these operating systems, and has a much smaller user and developer community.

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/12/nearly_2_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html

Notably they don't even mention NetBSD. In fact, Netcraft barely ever mentions NetBSD. I get _two_ hits on their entire site for it. Pretty big oversight for something running 90% of the web!

Here's a FAQ from 2001 from a commercial BSD company describing FreeBSD as "the most popular open source version of the BSD OS". Weird how, according to you, NetBSD…

One of my favorite startups. I signed up for a single server some time ago to try them out and was amazed when I saw the control panel, API and the ecosystem that has already built up around the service.

To those of you asking what is so special about DO compared to ExyExtraVps.is running stock WHMCS[1] or whatever over at LEB it is that DO are providing the type of features, flexibility and support that Rackspace, AWS and Azure provide but at prices that are close to what the low-end VPS types offer.

If you imagine a Gartner-style quadrant for hosting with price on one axis and then features/support/flexibility on another most providers today sit somewhere along a very straight line - you either have a bunch of features and flexibility and are expensive or you are very rigid and cheap. DO is right up in high features but low price, and it seems so obvious in hindsight (Linode were almost there).

I now have Vagrant setup with Digital Ocean as a provider[2] so setting up a box is as easy as running 'vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean' and then waiting a minute. There are tons of other tools already built up around their API and the ecosystem is thriving. I have another script setup ready to fire up additional instances of web apps.

I'm moving everything I can and that fits from AWS and recommending DO to clients also where it would fit (staging servers, dev servers, backup servers, etc.) There are still some features they need - like load balancing, multiple IP's etc.…

On the enterprise or business to business side, signals are weaker, and signs of traction are harder to identify. However, Mattermark has found that tracking sales support materials (videos, whitepapers, and other documentation) is a signal and makes it easier to view traffic as an exhaust of the sales process.

Through this method, Mattermark listed cloud hosting startup Digital Ocean as its top pick for a pre-Series A company. The company raised a healthy round a few months later, mainly because of its success with developers.

This post seems to imply that Mattermark identified Digital Ocean as a promising pre-Series A company before anyone else. This isn't the case. Mattermark's Digital Ocean "call" was published on June 22, 2013. At the time, Digital Ocean's rise was being noted by others based on more meaningful criteria than "sales support materials" (see http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-rise-of-digitalocean.html for example), and as a 2012 TechStars participant, the company was almost certainly on the radar of investors for over a year.

For new investors, Mattermark and Dashboard.io aim to be a check on a startup’s performance. Both companies are also experimenting with their notifications system. Based on an investors’ specifications, they may be able to alert customers to a hot opportunity.

One of Morrill’s favorite examples is Instagram, a startup that was acquired by Facebook for a cool $1 billion, making its investors…

I love statistics. They can be used to say just about whatever one desires.

The goal of the post seems to be to show relevance and traction gains in the market. The charts from netcraft that discuss all domains are pointless for that, because domains are a dime a dozen. What we should pay attention to are the numbers across the busiest sites.

First, is a million sites a good measure? Netcraft has identified just over 180 million websites, so the million busiest sites seems a pretty good assessment. To be useful, we need to see how nginx fares in the market of websites where these decisions count. So, the busiest million sites is a good measure for that.

Of the four servers identified (Google App Engine is a toy, shouldn't be on this list), nginx is the only one that actually made quantifiable gains in the two months compared. Both Apache and Microsoft/IIS took steps back. In this consideration, nginx sits at 8% share, which is essentially "statistically relevant". But even then, it's only one month of data. A longer term view is more relevant.

Back in April (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/04/06/april-2011-web-server-survey.html), nginx was measured in the same context at 6.5% of these same sites; half a year later, nginx sits at 8%.

Here's the summary: nginx is making relevant market share gains in the web server space, and is taking share from both Microsoft/IIS and Apache.

> In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD

Do you have any sources to back this claim? I've always thought that (perhaps mistakenly) by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform.

Not asking because I think you are wrong -- I just would love to read more about this and couldn't find anything more than a web server survey from 2006[1]. The survey doesn't really mention specifics about any of the Unix-like platforms other than "Linux" or "Apache" (which I assume by Linux or Apache they are grouping all non-Windows OS-es together).

My interest: I'm a regular Linux user with some FreeBSD experience who finds the BSDs super interesting and their approach very admirable.

[1] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web_server_survey.html