[Zope-Annce] Zope servers jump 50%, more than 50, 000 servers counted.

[Martijn Pieters]

According to the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey[1], not only did the
Apache web server breach the 40 million servers mark, but the number of
Zope servers jumped by 50% since December 2004. While Apache slowly
approaches a 70% market-share, Zope has entered the top-20 of web
servers, with over 50,000 Zope servers counted.

On December 31, Netcraft tallied 33,305 Zope servers and published that
number in their January 2005 report[2]. But one month later, it counted
a whopping 50,067 servers, which places it on the 16th spot in the
February 2005 survey[3]. This means that *at least* nearly 1 in 1000
websites runs on Zope!

Why the big jump, and why do I say 'at least'? We can only speculate
what happened in January, but I think I have a pretty good guess, which
also explains my 'at least' stance. Many older Zope sites are run behind
the Apache webserver (or others) in a way that hides the relationship;
Netcraft sees Apache or IIS and counts it as such. However, modern Zope
servers usually are run with the Apache mod_proxy module, which allows
any visitor to see that the website is run on Zope, really. My guess is
that a large Zope hosting provider switched their Apache config over to
mod_proxy making the already existing sites count as Zope servers.

Also, there are still many Zope servers that are still counted as
Apache, or IIS, or any other fronting web server out there, and their
number is unknown. For all we know, 50,067 is the tip of the Zope
iceberg. And that's just a sample of the visible web sites out there, no
private intranets and such were counted.

Way to go, Zope!

[1] http://tinyurl.com/6yyqj (Shortened URL for a story on
     http://news.netcraft.com/)
[2] http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/Reports/0501/
[3] http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/Reports/0502/

Martijn Pieters