Webmaster Bulleted List
Amount Charged For Advertising
Graphs: [Location]
- Three out of four Webmasters (75.5%) report that they do not provide advertising on
their sites. 6.8% report charging more than $100/week. While this may not seem like a
large number of sites, it is more than a 600% increase when compared to the Third Survey a
year and a half ago, where only 1% charged this much for advertising.
Intended Server In 6 Months
Graphs: [Location]
- The server that the highest percentage of Webmasters plan to operate in the next 6 months is
Netscape (34.8%) followed by WebSTAR (26.91%) and Apache (23.84%). 18.19% are planning on using
Microsoft's server. Europeans (31.15%) were planning on using Apache more than US Webmasters (22.87%).
Log File Analysis Tools
Graphs: [Location]
- This is a new question to the surveys. Most Webmasters reported using a logfile
analysis package not listed as one of our options (42.94%), while 27.49% reported
not using any packages at all. For those Webmasters who do use a package listed,
Webstat (18.6%) and WWWstat (14.04%) were the most popular. Relatively few
users reported using Net.genesis (3.82%), Interse (1.91%), or I/PRO (1.58%).
Mirror
Graphs: [Location]
- The majority of sites do not operate mirrors (85.55%) or proxies (73.92%). This
is a very stable characteristics with little growth over the years. In the Third Survey
(April 1995) only a small percentage of users (12.63%) operated a proxy server or
mirrored sites (8.55%) then as well.
Network Connection Speed
Graphs: [Location]
- A third of the Webmasters (33.64%) report that the connection of their server to the
Internet is 1 Mb/sec. The next most common connection speed is 28 Kb/sec (14.53%) followed
by 10 Mb/sec (11.88%), 128 Kb/sec (9.72%) and 45 Mb/sec (9.14%). This pattern of a large
number of users with fast 1 Mb/sec connections and the rest spread out fairly equally on
the slower and faster connections is continuance of a trend towards slower server connection
speeds. In the Fifth Survey, 37.1% had 1Mb/sec connections, with the next most common being
10Mb/sec (19.8%). Modems accounted for under 10% of the connection speeds in the Fifth
Survey compared to close to 18% in the Sixth Survey. In the Third Survey, the most common
server connection speed was 10 Mb/sec (38.94%) followed by 1 Mb/sec with 12.88% and 56 Kb/sec with
11.08%.i In the Second Survey (October 1994), 54% reported connection speeds of 1 Mb/sec!
Number Of Servers Operating
Graphs: [Location]
- The majority of Webmasters report operating one server (43.36%), with 23.42% operating 2,
13.12% operating 3, and 6.56% operating more than 10 servers (a 2% increase over the Fifth Survey).
European Webmasters are more likely to operate more servers than US Webmasters.
Operate Intranet
Graphs: [Location]
- Just under half of the webmasters who responded are
operating an internal server (42.19%). The percentage who operate
internal servers in Europe is slightly higher: 48.36%.
Sole Webmaster
Graphs: [Location]
- This is a new question to the surveys. Over half of the Webmasters share the position
with other people (51.91%). Europeans share the responsibility of Webmaster (55.74%)
more so than US Webmasters (51.84%).
Time Spent Being Webmaster
Graphs: [Location]
- This is the first time we asked this question. The majority of Webmasters spend under 25% of
their time performing Webmaster duties. Only 8.89% report spending over 75% of their time as Webmaster.
US Webmasters typically spend more of their time as Webmasters than their European counterparts.
While the role of Webmaster is a very new position significant portions of worker's time is spent
performing Webmaster tasks, especially in the US.
Which Features Are Important
Graphs: [Location]
- Respondents were allowed to mark more than one answer. The most important
feature in selecting a Web server is performance (80.73%), followed by
ease of administration (72.67%), price (56.56%), database integration (53.16%), and
secure communications (47.51%). While the percentages have shifted slightly upward
for most features since the Fifth Survey, the ranking of the top five features has remained
the same. Virtual hosting increased though in importance from 9th at 28.66% in the Fifth Survey
to 7th at 34.34% in the Sixth Survey. European Webmasters are not as concerned about features
as US Webmasters.
Which Server
Graphs: [Location]
- The server used most by the respondents is Netscape (31.06%), followed by WebSTAR(23.59%),
Other (23.34%), Apache (21.68%), Microsoft (13.87%), NCSA (13.12%), MacHTTP (12.69%), Website (8.8%),
CERN (6.89%) and winHTTP (2.49%). While this distribution has strong similarity to the Fifth
Survey, where Netscape lead the pack with 30.3% followed closely by NCSA (25.5%) and WebSTAR (24.7%),
this distribution does not mirror other surveys of Web servers, in particular Netcraft's
Survey of HTTP Server. Netcraft's survey
asks it's database of over 500,000 servers what software it is running. Their most recent results
place Apache with 41%, Netscape with 13%, NCSA with 13%, and Microsoft with 10%. There are several
reasons why our survey differs from theirs. The most important reason has to do with the non-random sampling
and self-selection issues explained in the Sixth Survey's
discussion of methodology. This reduces the ability of our results to generalize to the entire server
population. However, Netcraft's methodology has trouble with virtual hosting and load balancing.
The jury is still out on this one.
