Netcraft's August 2013 Web Server Survey suggests that despite widespread expectations, the PRISM affair has not impacted US data centers or web hosting companies. PRISM became household news when NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the program, run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007, has been collecting massive amounts of electronic data including emails and chats. His revelations also suggested that major US cloud industry players provide information to the US government.
Established in 1994, Bath, UK-based Netcraft analyses web server and web hosting market-share information. The company's August 2013 report does not suggest the expected "mass exodus from American data centers and web hosting companies" has actually taken place. After looking at data related to "the most popular 10 thousand" websites, Netcraft concluded only 40 sites moved away from US-based web hosting companies, while 47 websites actually moved to US hosting. This trend was also reflected across the entire web - 270 thousand sites moved to the US from other countries.
The survey also suggested a number of key trends within the web hosting industry. Its August analysis looked at responses from 716,822,317 websites, which was an increase of 18 million sites over last month. Netcraft has suggested that based on statistics gathered over the last six months, around 1 billion responsive websites will be available through the Internet within the next 18 months.
The survey also suggested that the number of websites hosted on web servers supported by Apache software has gone down by 5.23% - a loss of 28 million Apache sites and the first time since December 2009 that Apache has not been used by more than half of the world's websites. Apache now has a market share of 46.96%, its lowest since March 2009. Microsoft IIS, however, gained 26 million sites while 3.1 million new sites utilized Google's App Engine infrastructure. There were also 2.7 million new Blogger (blogspot.com) blog sites. Go Daddy was responsible for a lot of this change - the company moved 25 million sites using Apache Traffic Server on Linux to Microsoft IIS 7.5.
PRISM? Apache? Microsoft IIS? GoDaddy? What are your views? Add your comments below.
