GVU's Sixth WWW User Survey Webmaster Graphs

Which Server

Notes:

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.

Table of Data for All Categories

Which Server	All	USA	Europe
Apache	261.00 21.68%	160.00 20.33%	38.00 31.15%
BestWWWD	9.00 0.75%	3.00 0.38%	0.00 0.00%
CERN	84.00 6.98%	51.00 6.48%	14.00 11.48%
MacHTTP	156.00 12.96%	110.00 13.98%	10.00 8.20%
Microsoft	167.00 13.87%	112.00 14.23%	13.00 10.66%
NCSA	158.00 13.12%	113.00 14.36%	15.00 12.30%
Netscape	374.00 31.06%	238.00 30.24%	32.00 26.23%
Other	281.00 23.34%	180.00 22.87%	26.00 21.31%
WebSTAR	284.00 23.59%	216.00 27.45%	19.00 15.57%
WebSite	106.00 8.80%	61.00 7.75%	3.00 2.46%
winHTTP	30.00 2.49%	18.00 2.29%	1.00 0.82%

For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.

GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280