News

Netcraft: Windows 2003 Sites Doubled Since July

• By Scott Bekker
• September 24, 2003

The number of active Windows Server 2003 sites more than doubled since July, according to the U.K.-based Internet services and research firm Netcraft. One in 20 of those Windows Server 2003 sites migrated from Linux, Netcraft found.

In all there were 185,000 active sites running Windows Server 2003, a 109 percent jump from July. That's a relatively small fraction of all Windows-based Web servers. It accounts for less than 4 percent of the 4.8 million Windows servers found during Netcraft's September edition of its monthly survey. Overall, most active sites don't run Microsoft Web servers, they run the Apache Web server, which has 13.4 million active sites.

But the momentum for Windows Server 2003 is fairly quick for a four-and-half-month-old operating system.

Netcraft compared the Windows Server 2003 sites against the operating system that the sites had been running before. The firm found that 49 percent were upgrades from other versions of Windows, 42 percent were new sites, 5 percent were migrations from Linux, 1 percent were migrations from FreeBSD and 1 percent were migrations from Sun Solaris.

"Notably, the number of sites switching from Linux has proportionately kept pace since July when many commentators thought the 5 percent of sites switched to Windows 2003 from Linux was an aberration," Netcraft researchers noted.

About 95,000 of the active Windows Server 2003 sites are at eight major hosting companies. Myhosting.com is the top hoster of active sites on Windows Server 2003. The company has nearly 33,000 sites, about 98 percent of its total, on Windows Server 2003.