[Zope] What's up with netcraft?

[Martijn Pieters]

> I noticed that the latest netcraft survey shows that there are 4056 live
> Zope servers on the net in August.
>
> http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/Reports/0108/
>
> This is down from 11756 servers in July.
>
> Here is a graph:
>
> http://www.ozzope.org/aboutzope/
>
> What is going on here?  Did half the people running Zope suddenly switch
> off their servers or did Netcraft muck up their stats last month?

I can think of three scenario's, both based on the fact that there was a
Belgian domain name broker that had several thousand template websites
running in Zope.

Netcraft takes special care to count template sites on one server as only
one site: http://www.netcraft.com/survey/index-200007.html#active. The
domain name broker's template pages were however not counted as one server
due to some extra, random, HTML tags that circumvent Netcrafts technique to
detect template sites. Because of this extra HTML, the several thousand
template sites were counted individually by Netcraft; that's why there were
so many non-dotcom Zope servers.

I think one of the following three scenarios happened:

- Netcraft discovered that several thousand websites were in fact template
sites that they want to count as one server and enhanced their detection
scheme to take the Belgian broker's HTML into account, or added the ip range
manually.

- The Belgian broker changed the template such that Netcraft's algorithm
counts the template sites as one server.

- The template sites no longer run on Zope for whatever reason.

It looks like the last scenario, I checked via Netcraft  and noticed that
the broker switched hosting provider and in the process it's sites switched
from Zope to Apache. Here is one example:

  http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.daimler.be

--
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer  mailto:mj@zope.com
| Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com/
| Creators of Zope   http://www.zope.org/
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