Survey | Reports | Servers | What's that site running?

If you would like to ensure that an individual hostname is included in future surveys, just query the host; if you have a big list of servers please mail us.

Virtual Hosts

Many servers support facilities to enable a single computer to run a server for multiple domain names on different ip addresses. Additionally, some service providers offer a more crude domain aliasing facility with multiple hostnames resolving to the same ip address, and customers home pages being referenced by a trailing pathname. This survey counts each of these domain names as separate servers.

This is arbitrary, but simple. Usually the organisations and businesses represented on a virtual hosting machine are unrelated, and so there is also some commerical rationale for considering even hostnames such as www.sunalliance.co.uk and www.commercial-union.co.uk, that share the same ip address, as distinct, even though it is surprising that such large and successful organisations would use a valuable and mnemonic hostname to resolve to a page which does not carry their own material.

The most extreme case is BestWWWD which is a virtual hosting system with many customers running independently named servers.

Load Balancing Hosts

Some servers which are particularly popular, such as Playboy and Netscape operate a load balancing scheme whereby accesses to a given domain name are shared amongst a pool of computers. This will normally be shown as a single server in the survey; as with virtual hosts, it is the domain name that is important rather than the number of computers used.

Servers Found != Licences Sold

Trying to work out how many licences Netscape (or any other paid for server) has sold from this survey is a poor idea. Firstly, it's possible to run an arbitrary number of servers from a given computer and from a single software licence. Secondly, there are many servers within organisations own private networks, out of sight of the the internet community, for which licenses will be purchased.

Server Personalisation

Some sites like to personalise the server name returned to the browser, for reasons of kudos, or security. This accounts for most of the server names returned by just one or two sites.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Atul Arora and Tim O'Reilly for their comments on previous issues of the survey. Thanks also to Dirk De Bock for giving us access to a list of several hundred servers in the .be Belgium domain, Eric Zelenka for a list of circa 100 servers, and Tim O'Reilly for a list of 283 servers.

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